My experience with direct connected iSCSI storage on a TSM server is
that it gets abysmal performance unless you turn off Direct IO in
TSM.  See other posts for that.  It is technically possible, but with
the iSCSI limitation you might not want to use RMD "Raw Device
Mapping" in VMware.  I am not sure on this, but it makes sense given
what I have seen and read about here.  By the way, NFS and CIFS were
equally bad performers for disk pools with DirectIO turned on.  They
seem to really need the filesystem caching.  I'm "guessing" that
putting the disks in a VMFS would help buffer the writes, and give you
decent performance.

It is something that would need to be tested first.  I'm confident
that it would be much faster than WAN connection back to the States.
Yuck.

Good luck,

Gary Bowers
Itrus Technologies

On Mar 11, 2010, at 1:18 PM, Ochs, Duane wrote:

Good day everyone,
Has anyone explored using TSM server (windows) on a VM using Iscsi
storage ? No library requirement at this time.
I have multiple European sites within close proximity of each other
and they have outgrown the WAN coming back to the states.
Only storage available there is Iscsi and they have a substantial
VMware implementation which would allow us to ride on a VM if
feasible/functional.

Thoughts ?

Thanks,
Duane