Well, it is official: We have our iSCSI target set up on our DL380 G5 WIndows Storage Server. Our final specs ended up as follows:
HP DL380 G5 Windows Storage Server
1 Quad-Core Intel Chip (2.2ghz)
2GB Memory
MSA 60 w/ 12 750gb drives (9.6tb total)
We configured the initial volume for RAID5 with 12 drives, no online spares. We’re pretty good about watching our drives when they fail (and have never had two hit us at once) and replacing them right away.
We set up the Windows iSCSI Target (formerly WinTarget) and it has been working fantastic. The performance is quite acceptable for our environment…in fact, we’ve yet to see I/O limits thus far, even with a number of VM installations going at the same time to an iSCSI target. So far, things have worked out very well.
I am also quite impressed with the performance of ESXi, too. Despite the minor delay in getting it set up, we have been able to allocate an impressive number of VM’s utilizing minimal memory.