I have just purchased 5 IBM 3650's with 3-dual port HBA'a and 8GB of memory, boot over san to use as storage nodes in a HP-UX 11-11 environment. Currently I have only one storage node, so adding 5 more will increase my ability to have more nodes for storage and cloning thus increasing my thruput. Our management from another area of the IT want to take these five storage nodes and move them to VMware. First of all VMware does not suport SAN attached tape drives. which im sure will be resolved in the future. My question is what are the I/O best practices for a Storage Node. I have tried using VMware in the past for other things and found the response to I/O intensive to be unacceptable. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.