What I like about LeftHand SAN's

I am really enamored by LeftHands Virtual Appliance

http://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=LHNSW8.1

This is what Hp defines it as

• Provides shared storage for VMware ESX environments leveraging current disk storage on the server
• Enables VMware advanced features: HA, VMotion, DRS, SRM
• Scalable without disruption
• VMware certified compatible SAN/storage device

It seems to be an interesting way to convert the local disk on an ESX server into usable SAN space. It also seems like a great option for DR. You could get a virtual server spun up and then replicate your data to that remote site!

I started thinking about this and I am convinced that LeftHand should start giving away this virtual appliance for free! Now I know that I sound like a heretic, but I think this would a great way for LeftHand to get out in the market, and let people become familiar and used to their products. This would be a similar move that VMware took when they started giving away their vm products.

I have noticed this post though, that talks about

One issue with using a VSA as iSCSI storage on the same ESX server hosting the VSA is that rebooting the ESX server can take a long time, and may not complete, since the VSA has to shutdown first taking some storage offline before ESX is done shutting down.
Also on bootup the VSA is not online when ESX is first looking for iSCSI.
All this is avoided usually since VSA are meant to me clustered together to provide redundancy. But if using just one VSA, or a power event takes the whole cluster offline you would run into this issue.

If you go here you can download the scripts that address this
http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1333605