I’ve come across a great little free Iscsi SAN VA which includes VAAI support. I’ve previously used Opefiler and Freenas to name a few to supply backend storage to my vSphere hosts but this product is new to me.
Its called QUADStor and is a Linux or FreeBSD based Iscsi SAN device, Once you have compiled the binaries onto the OS of your choice (redhat,CentOS, SLES, Debian or FreeBSD) provisioning storage is really easy.Compiling the binaries for those not quite so confident for *nix is also easy and every step is well documented from the QUADStor website. The VA must be licensed but its totally free and supports up to 16TB which should be enough for any home lab. Also as the product is in BETA naturally the no production data rule applies.
I shall not go into details on this blog post but its more really to raise awareness of this free option for adding VAAI support to your home lab.
