I'm a relative noob at virtualisation but would like to roll it out in our organisation. The application I'd like to test with needs to be back up pretty quickly after failure... So I'd like to put 2 VMWare servers on the network and have the virtual machines on a disk array so that if one of the hosts goes down I can bring the VM up on the second host. We don't currently have a windows storage server NAS on the network but we do have a Windows Server with a lot of disk space in it.
Also, our internal backups are carried out using DPM 2007 as a result to backup the data it needs to be on a windows machine (I think)
In an ideal world I can share a large array on the windows server and VMWare ESX server use that as a datastore for the VMs.
However, I'm worried that will either be impossible or perform poorly... in which case I guess we use Server 2008 Hyper-V instead of vmware... or is there a better way to provide the redundancy I'm after here?
Finding out my question is meaningless would be as useful as getting an answer because I'm still at the research stage :)