I recently had the opportunity to deploy an <a href="http://go.iomega.com/en-us/products/network-storage-rack/ix12-300r/ix12-300r/?partner=4760">Iomega StorCenter ix12-300r </a>12-Bay Network Storage Array as part of a new VMware vSphere 4.1 implementation. The Iomega is a low-cost shared storage solution that supports VMware VMotion.

There are two key points to understand when deploying this solution with VMware ESX and ESXi.

1) While the StorCenter does support iSCSI LUNs, it only permits attaching them to a single host – which is not useful for VMotion

2) For shared storage that supports VMotion use NFS instead. There are three keys to making this work successfully:
<p style="padding-left: 30px">1) On the Iomega NAS, name the NFS folder using lower case letters only</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px">2) On the Iomega NAS, secure the NFS by specifying that only hosts in a specified IP address range can connect. For example: 10.0.100.0/255.255.255.0. You can adjust the subnet mask as needed to reduce the scope to an acceptable range</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px">3) On the ESXi hosts, specify the path to the NFS folder in the form “/nfs/folder”</p>