I assume from ops original question that he is considering connecting his file server to a SAN vs local storage, but there really isn't enough detail to tell.

@dashrender said in the benefits for a small company that wants to use a virtual server:

Lack of testing by a vendor isn't really something to prevent you from using it, unless that means the vendor will refuse to support you. In that case you should dump them like a hot potato and move onto someone who believes in their technology and keeps it up to date.

Saying you don't support would basically be like saying, you can only run this software on IBM hardware, but not Dell.

http://www.smbitjournal.com/2016/10/you-cant-virtualize-that/

Hi Kelsey,

First of all, as previously mentioned in the thread, the IPOD scenario is absolutely atrocious no matter how you look at it. You pay more to get more hardware to manage to get lower resiliency. Here is a very short paper on why it's particularly important to have HA or FT in a virtual inrastructure:
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/fault-tolerance-and-high-availability-page

A way to play around IPOD is replicating local storage across the hypervisor hosts. Here is a doc describing how it's done:
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/whitepapers/starwind-virtual-san-whitepaper.pdf

Also, our forums are pretty helpful and you can ask different virtualization, storage, HA questions there:
https://forums.starwindsoftware.com