With the symbiotic relationship between Cisco and VMWare, I’m slowly becoming a VMWare junkie. Their free ESXi platform is entirely addicting. Anyhow, I’ve always dreamed of having a SAN in my home connected to my VMWare ESXi server…now it’s possible!!! IOMega (now EMC) has created some low-cost, VMWare-certified SAN storage.

These are cheaper buying from Amazon.com rather than IOMega. While I’d love a ix4-200r, it’s only got one Gigabit Ethernet port (no redundancy), so I went for the ix4-200d (dual GBit Ethernet ports). Anxious for it to arrive! Boy – Wireshark books and iSCSI storage all it one week – it’s Christmas in March!

A word on the “VMware Certified” — pretty much for anything that doesn’t require a driver in the VMkernel there really isn’t much special about iSCSI or NFS or FC targets being certified. It basically means that the company chose to pay vmware to put their stamp on the system and add it to the HCL.

For home or test lab use with ESXi I’d honestly recommend building out a small NAS with OpenSolaris or Nexenta. If you can, do it with more than 4 drives or add a small SSD for L2ARC and/or ZIL and you will pretty much be set for a home lab.