There's no difference. Volume is just another file on RAWFS pretty much like IMG is a file on NTFS. We don't use any I/O Manager and Cache & Memory Manager services to access files, we work with them in pass-thru mode. File system is used for locking and allocation only. Cache is deduplicated (optinally), aligned, pre-allocated and multilevel. Windows file cache is just not good enough for what we do as our I/O pattern is very different from generic server load one.
Images are more flexible as you can move them from one place to another. It could be rather difficult with a complete volume.
I'd keep this before we'll do triple nodes. With data triplicated (Jan 2012) you can keep RAID0 on a single node and have 1/3 of RAW capacity with higher performance instead of 1/4 of RAW capacity you have now.
bbell wrote:When using Starwind with VMware ESX which performs better; Image file or Disk Bridge, and why?
BTW, I will be using mirroring also if that matters.
Are there any other benefits of Image file or Disk Bridge when compared to each other?
Overall solution is using two ESX hosts and two Starwind iSCSI SANs (mirrored). Each iSCSI SAN will have 8 - 1TB drives configured into two RAID 10 groups. Giving me approx 4TB usable.
