After reading quite a bit more about storage, I get the feeling that local storage is not that common in the way I have in mind.
Is it possible to add my excising software RAID5 array as local storage to the VMware server without changing it? I like to keep this array "server independent" so that in case of a server failure, I could just move the array to any other server that has enough SATA connections. I'm not backing up this array as it is to big and therefore making it to expensive to backup. In case the array does get destroyed, I'll take my losses. Of course I like to minimise the risks.
And can I add a single (backup) disk to the VMware server? (no USB). I like to backup critical data to this disk, say every hour and mirror this disk to an offsite location. In this case I can use a RAID1 array build out of SSD's to host the guest OS's. I won't need a lot of capacity for that.
Perhaps I'm to short minded in this. I'm open for suggestions in that matter. But I don't want to spend a big sum of money on SSD's to gain enough IOPS and capacity.
Thanks for any help!
Robbert