Hi Ashley,  ScaleIO is an enterprise level storage, which means redundancy, thus single component failure should not affect the clients. ScaleIO was designed to run on physical hosts, therefore, using option 2 or 3 will work, however you won't get the desired performance.
Hi, We are wanting to eval ScaleIO on our system as a standalone host with no failure servers. We currently don't have any pass through devices that we can enable on our farm as currently our storage is provided by FC SANs. What I want is for the ScaleIO VMware deployment to spit out an installation that will allow me to add virtual disks to the single appliance after install (so I can re-present say a single 200GB vmdk as a virtual disk 1 to the appliance (this is just for eval). When I go through the vsphere install there seem to be a couple of quirks that prevent this. I have selected a "single mode deployment under advanced options" and I have deselected the "MDM cluster mode" option (step 5). I then get stuck at step 10; "Add SDSs" - even though I've already specified the host I'm going to dpeloy on I can only get to step 11 by selected the host + an additional 2 hosts. This shouldn't be enforced on a single node deployment surely? On step 11 because I don't currently have any devices that can be used (as they are the FC LUNS already representing the datastores on our farm), I can't proceed to step 12.  So what I'm looking for is an option to allow a single host to be specified for the SDS and for the "Add devices to SDS" option to be deferred until after the setup is deployed (to give me chance to add a virtual disk of 3 after the appliance has been deployed).  How do I achieve this through the vsphere deployment GUI?
How to use VMware deployment on a standalone host for eval.