I am looking into improving performance in my vSphere environment. We are using a NetApp appliance with all VMs stored in Datastores that are mounted via NFS.
It was suggested to me that, for some specific workloads (like SQL data or a file server), it may be better for disk IO performance to use iSCSI for the data vHD.
In my example, the boot disk would be a normal VMDK stored in the NFS-attached datastore. The D drive (the disk where the SQL data or the fileserver data resides) would be a iSCSI-attached volume.
C: - VMDK disk container -> VMFS datastore -> NFS -> NetApp
D: - iSCSI -> NetApp
I am also pondering: iSCSI initiated from the vSphere level or directly from Windows?
Does anyone have any experience or thoughts with this?