Recommendations

[Cruicer]

I am being asked to provide some suggestions on a small shared storage environment.  if a client wishes to pick up their environment they can with minimal reconfiguration. Environment is going to consist of:

3 node cluster

About 10-20 VMs (Servers and Workstations)

Not quite sure on how much storage, but for now let's just say 5-10TB. 

For the time being I have to manage it in my current vCenter environment which is vCenter Server 5.0, various ESX 4.1 hosts but mostly ESX 5.0 U3's.  I can't use vSAN since some of my older hardware (DL380 G5's DL585 G5 won't support the newer versions of ESX).

Anyone have any recommendations that I should look into?  I has to be semi quick too...of course.

[Renmo]

Why not looking into the entry level storages, for example HP MSA 1040 (limited to max of 3 enclosures) but cheap , the 2040 is more expensive but salable.

If it's an environment that will not scale i'd go for the 1040 and 8/8 fc switches to connect the 3 hosts, that should be a cost effective solution. an advice not to ignore the disk performance, don't only consider the nearline and go for the cheapest, you might need that performance, depends on the workloads but just keep that in mind.