A while back (2004), Dave McCrory and I patented an interesting curosity that we called the Shared Nothing Virtual Cluster.  Basically, the idea is to use OS RAID 1 on a VM but to have the VHDs split between physical hosts.  If the host died, the VM could be restarted on a the second host using the RAID mirror.

It was an interesting idea, but seemed less than ideal because everyone was running to SAN storage and falling madly (insanely?) in love with vMotion.

Now that we’re looking towards clouds that beyond SAN scale, the idea of mixing DAS and NAS to create instant redundancy for VMs may suddenly have more value.

Of course, Sugient owns the patent now…