iSCSI SAN server - RAID question

RAID 50 will definitely have adequate performance - although if space is not a primary concern and performance is more of an issue, you may consider going with RAID 10, however I have seen both RAID 50 and RAID 10 perform well with negligible difference.

Check this out: http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~ken/perf_tests.html

Raid 50 will do great. By going with a Raid 10, you may have increased IOPS...but the performance increase won't be that massive. Raid 50 definitely shines for random read/write applications (such as SQL).

Network wise, you are also great.

The only thing I could complain on is the fact that you are using SATA drives (well, that is an assumption, so correct me if I am wrong). How many VMs do you plan to run? 14TBs for VM storage in a lab is a lot, and if you are planning the buy the drives, I would recommend getting SAS drives for increased performance. For my home lab, I will have 4 600GB Hitachi Ultrastar 15K RPM SAS drives in a Raid 5, which will give me ~1.8TB usable...and since most of my VMs are only 30-50GB, I should be able to have at least 30 VMs (which for a home lab is more than enough). Those 4 drives will be in my Norco RPC-4224 along with 20 Toshiba DT01ACA300 3TB SATA drives in a Raid 60 (this is purely for storage, media streaming, etc) all attached to my LSI MegaRaid 9261-8i and HP SAS Expander. I will also be using Starwinds iSCSI Target, along with their SMI-S Provider (assuming i can get it working) so I can manage my storage from System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager.

My last comment/question, do you plan to thin provision or full provision? I ALWAYS recommend full provisioning. There is no reason not too, since storage is cheap and plentiful, and over-provisioning is bad bad bad. With SATA drives, I definitely recommend full provisioning.

If he's got the money I would definitely go with SAS drives, also.
+1

Something tells me those Hitachi 1TB drives aren't SAS, so a fair assumption I'd say

You're good to go then.
Sorry I totally forgot you already had the drives!

It's not about them being heavily used - it's about them being used simultaneously. Even if each VM only needed to read 10MB of data, when you've got 10 VMs doing it at the same time HDDs can struggle to keep up. Especially if you're trying to do a test deployment of something like a distributed VDI environment, where you'll be running like 20 VMs at the same time with even more VMs nested inside those.

No actually I think it will be fine. Worst case, if you do have trouble, you can split it into two or more separate arrays and spread the VMs out across them.

Hell, in my home "lab" I only have four 1TB Caviar Blacks and an SSD, but they get me by

I was just pointing out what sort of considerations should be taken into account, that's all!