I've been tasked with finding alternatives for storage VDIs and other underlying data in our Xen virtual machines. We currently use a NetApp filer cluster, but with the heads going EOL in December there's reluctance to continue to spend on NetApp. I'm told lots of people are doing all sorts of things with distributed storage underneath Xen, but I'm having trouble finding actual references or documentation.
This is VDIs for ~350 machines, averaging 6G per machine so its not giant but I can't get by with pooling the internal 36G drives my blades came with.
Can anybody tell me how they're doing Xen in a distributed storage environment, or point me at resources you used to set your environment up? Or am I being sent on a fool's errand and I should be instead justifying a NetApp or similar solution to my boss?