I second the request for clarification on the redundant storage solution to work with a Mac Mini (with Thunderbolt and USB3) support.
Currently I'm using an external NAS that hosts ESXi datastores via iSCSI. This works fairly well for a home lab environment. I'm currently running 6 VMs on the Mac Mini 6,2 with five of them being hosted on the iSCSI datastore on the RAID NAS. However, I'm not too pleased with the vendor of my NAS, and I'm looking to migrate my RAID based datastore to another platform.
My primary alternatives at this time is either Synology DS713+ or a Drobo Mini/Drobo 5D. I am now running OS X 10.8.2 VM with the Server App, and I believe that I can provide all the file serving, media serving, FTP/SFTP, WebDAV, etc., via this OS X Server VM. So, the RAID storage device I'm looking for does not have to be a NAS (but it can if it also supports iSCSI). I would really prefer to use a DAS like a Drobo Mini/Drobo 5D solution.
I've asked this question many times, but I have not yet heard anyone answer it. Has the Thunderbolt Drobo devices (Drobo Mini/Drobo 5D) or any other Thunderbolt based RAID devices been tested with ESXi 5.x? My first preference would be to use in such a capacity that ESXi can use it as an external datastore and so that Drobo itself manages the RAID. If this is not possible, I could consider using the Thunderbolt based Drobo as a directly attached volume for the OS X VM running on the Mac Mini 6.2. This would only be possible if I could enable Thunderbolt for Direct Path I/O (passthrough) in ESXi 5.x, but this would have to be a reliable passthrough (not experimental support like I've learned that other types of Direct Path I/O passthrough are - especially USB passthrough).
I would really appreciate if someone who has had any experience using ESXi 5.x with Thunderbolt devices could contribute to this discussion.
Thanks!