We are planning to set up 3 VMware nodes and move our infrastructure from physical servers to virtual machines. I haven't decided which NAS to get yet, but I know I need to get one that supports iSCSI in order for things like VMware live migration to work.
Right now, we have a file server running Windows 2008 in an Active Directory environment. We have several shares that need to be secured by Active Directory permissions. Since we are making a large change in our infrastructure, it made me rethink the need for a dedicated Windows 2008 server just to host files if we are using a NAS.
The NAS will be used to store the VM images for the VMware servers. So would it be a good idea to also use the NAS as a file server, or should we do what we do now and use a Windows 2008 (virtual) server to serve the files? I'm thinking about this mostly from a performance perspective. Our current (physical) set up is kind of slow.