VDI on iSCSI

Hello skeptical IT guy,

maybe the follwing technical papers ,made by VMWARE, gives you an idea , from my opinion, the storage should be scalable without loosing performance, still easy to manage , Equallogic gives you the possibilities, here are 2 technical papers :
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/partners/dell/dell-vmware-desktop-wp-r208q4.pdf
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/partners/dell/dell-vmware-solution-brief-r2final08q4.pdf

both are very worth to read to give you an idea and with the next eql generation, the ps 6 series, you will get more performance for your money and with the san hq a very nice platform to manage your SAN enviroment, I also recommend to take a look on stackable switches like pc 62 series or cisco ones or force 10, please remind the compability of eql and switches, a solution , based on layer 2 switches (i.E. PC 54 series) won`t work due to limits of link aggreations (so the stacks are needed).
If you are still unsure if the ISCSI solution is the best for you, ask at dell for a storage assessment (yes it will cost you a little bit, but gives you an analysis of needed I/O`s , size , with the results you should be clear if iscsi or fibre channel might fit...

Cheers

Marcus

Thanks Marcus. I will check those pdf's out. I think EQL is great, and is probably a best case scenario for me, but due to cost I'm also looking at the MD3000i. Do you know if the MD3000i would perform well in a VDI environment with 100 users to start, scaling up to maybe 400+ users or am I living a pipe dream here?

Make sure you consider the 4-5 year model when making your hardware decision. Software feature set, and a 45 disk scalability model may be more of a limiting factor later then it is now. Snaps, for off production testing, Replication for off site data recovery, and the ability to change your RAID level are just a few considerations.

Big picture answer... if you are going to virtualize your desktops, why don't you virtualize your storage too? EQL will do that for you.