see what a hornets nest this stirs up. I'm pretty sure iscsi sans work on 1gb ethernet, that's going to be one hell of a bottleneck. all luns across all disks eh? Yeah the one I can't name is one of those - so far all I have is inconsistant test results and I broke one san due to a lack of backplane bandwidth. 300 spindles was mentioned to me but I don't have the full spec sadly. Put it like this my dedicated luns on my current emc san at least give consistant results, all still outperformed by 4 x 10k sas disks in a raid 10.

vms I've used for dev and test systems where performance isn't critical - I have no issues with that at all. As to parallelism and vms - I think that has to be absolute vendor bull**** and as I have worked almost exclusively with multi proc boxes since sql 6.5 I can't find any truth with that at all. But I think we should leave that aspect out of this. Great thread people keep it up - fascinating!