Vmware is really easy but it doesn’t work with machines that do not have hardware assisted RAID. Most of my clients(including myself) don’t have enough I/O demands tht a hardware accelerated card is required. This is when the beauties of Linux MD(NOT DM) RAID come into play. VMware doesn’t support MD raid…but the Linux kernel does. After ordering up a new server and much initial testing I have decided to standardize on Ubuntu LTS and KVM for my MD RAID Clients. The control panel is the great cloudmin product made by the folks who bring you webmin and virtualmin. The final leg of testing this solution is to use the vmware convertor and then pulling that image into kvm. If that goes well then the ECC platform has two interations:
For clients with larger budgets that include hardware assisted RAID: VMware ESXI along with a third party backup script
For clients with smaller budgets that use MD RAID: Ubuntu LTS w/KVM and Cloudmin.
I’m hoping to wrap up testing in the next month or two then ECC will release the official product announcement.