Keith you're perfectly right... we want a code without any problems and for this we are waiting for 8.1 GA, we're still on 7.3.6 because until last December we still had a FAS3050c so we could not upgrade to 8.0.2 without having snapmirror problem between older 7.3 and newer 8 release.
This is probably one of our major problem because we're now getting larger disks (450/600 GB SAS and probably 1-2 TB SATA in the next few months to do archiving) and with 7.3 we cannot use 64 bit and create aggregate and volumes from scratch is not really possible (we should at least have the same space to store data before destroying the old data aggregates) so we're mostly waiting 8.1 hoping on a aggr convertion functionality that will allow us to extend our aggregate to 64 bit.
We already have a total of 4 HA cluster (1 3270, 2 3240, 1 3160) in 2 different sites. Out Disaster Recovery solution is based on vmware SRM/snapmirror, all our oracle databases are on NFS shares and we use flexclone to provision and refresh test environment starting from our DR snapmirror. Our vmware environment is already up and running and including 95% of production/development/test servers (we only have some Oracle RAC database that are on physical machine but we're finishing to migrate to a physical/virtual configuration in production so we can have a fast DR of the virtual node).
We also started our view projects using vmware linked clone on view 5 (we did a pilot on view 4.6) with NFS datastore and we're getting nice results but having all the "storage things" done from the storage will really be nice
Our environment at this moment will be difficult if not impossible to migrate to a new c-mode configuration starting from scratch.
Normally we don't clone vm every day but in some period when we have upgrade projects or when we need to deploy a new environment for SAP we have to clone 5-10 servers at a time and having the fast vm clone that work in that way will be really nice
As it will be nice to have compression (I would like to try it on oracle archive logs volumes if it will not impact too much on performance, with a gzip we get a 50-75% compression and some of our database produce 700-800 gb/archive logs a week).
So 8.1 (and probably more with 8.1.1.) will really be a big storage milestone for our infrastructure, we will get almost all the functionality we would like to have from NetApp storage.
I know that all of you are working hard for a good release and I see this also with other piece of software NetApp is developing (I should say that WFA and SnapCreator are 2 fantastic products ) and let me hope that when 8.1 GA will be out 8.1.1 will follow shortly (it's just a .1 release )
Francesco
