I put together an ESX box for better management, but its performance is a WTF item; I'm a noob at dealing with ESX, so I'm looking for a laundry-list of reading material to help me straighten this out so I can go back to .NET programming.

Current storage system:

We're running Raid5+Hotspare (8x500 GB spindles) on a PERC6i on a Dell 2910. Due to ESX limitatios, the PERC is showing the storage as 1x2TB + 1x800GB "partitions." I'm not sure of the setup's configuration (stride / stripe / ???) at all.

Our Applications

We have a SBS server as well as a minor (2x50 GB, but growing at 10GB/month) database server...

Our application that lives on the database VM is CPU and I/O insense; it's a database churning excercise mixed in with a lot of computation on the data (fixing that performance is what I'm supposed to be working on)...

Perfomance Issue

When I do a backup, restore, or worse (copy a backup from 1 vm to another to move it to the QA VM), the entire system slows to a crawl (even "unrelated" VMs).

I originally thought a DASD situation would be quite good since you had PCI-x bandwidth, but the systemwide slowdown is killing productivity.

Questions

1. What should I do to make an intelligent decision about NAS vs RAID vs SAN vs DASD?
2. Are there sweet spots/ugly spots in the storage setup?
3. Can you use a SSD PCI-X card in ESX for the tempdb? Good/Bad idea?
4. Is there any way to "share" some image in a copy-on-write fashion? Most of the "Backup-Copy-Restore" is to "put a clean image on the dev boxes"; if I could have them "share" the master image, the "big copy" (2x50 GB) would only need to be done once per week instead of once per dev per week...[runtime performance isn't a concern with the dev boxes, but the backup/copy/restore kills production, SBS, and everything else on the box]