After spending some time today walking a customer through the basics of configuring VMware ESX networking, I realized that my site doesn’t provide much information for new users. I’m going to address that with a series of posts for new users, of which this article is the first.

Despite months of hyperbolic warnings, Cisco’s release today of their Unified Computing System blade servers (code named Project California) is gentle and evolutionary. The networking giant is challenging HP, IBM, and Dell, to be sure, but not with a slap in the face. Cisco is easing into the server pool with their UCS servers.

Most physical to virtual migrations (P2V) of servers end up as virtual machines with the partitions encapsulated in virtual disk (.vmdk or .vhd) files. But what if the physical server already has a partition that’s configured through an iSCSI connection to the SAN, and what if that’s the same SAN that the new VM will [...]