It's good to know Infiniband is supported in 5.1. All of our blade servers run Windows Server as that is the platform our web product is built on. Recently we upgraded them all to 2012 from 2008R2. With 2012 there are a host of new storage improvement's. While ZFS may be a better underlying storage system than Storage Spaces is, we choose to use Windows Server for ths SAN to take advantage of its new SMB 3.0, SMB-Direct (RDMA over SMB), and Scale-Out file server features. These features work very well with are blade Widows Servers and I think make the best choice for our environment. I still not entirely sold on the Storage Spaces JBOD solution but I really do like the other features.
Plus MS labs did a test setup using the DataOn JBOD device and 3 Windows Server 2012 nodes with Mellanox adapters and got some pretty amazing IOPS and Bandwidth. Currently the DataOn appliance is certified for Windows Storage Spaces and I believe is the only one that is at the moment.
Does anyone have any ideas about RDMA in Vsphere 5.1 and if it would play nicely with a physical to virtual route?
Thanks!