Hardware configuration for ESXi Server ok?!

[menace133780]

Hi,

I’m planning a new ESXi 6.5 virtualization host. The server will run standalone with a "VMware vSphere Essentials Kit" license.

There will be a bunch of small linux and windows VMs running on the system. Some small webservers, development servers, test-systems and so on.

The budged is about 15 - 20k €

At the moment I'm planning with the following components:

2 HE 19" server chassis

2 x Intel® Xeon® E5-2630 v4 2.2GHz,25M Cache,8.0 GT/s QPI,Turbo,HT,10C/20T (85W) Max Mem 2133MHz

6 x 32GB RDIMM, 2400MT/s, Dual Rank, x4 Data Width

8 x 600GB 15K RPM SAS 12Gbps 4Kn 2.5in Hot-plug Hard Drive,3.5in HYB CARR - in RAID10

1 x hardware RAID Controller, 2GB NV Cache

1 x Intel Ethernet I350 QP 1Gb Network Daughter Card

Is there anything to be done with this choice of the hardware?

Thanks for your help!

Kind regards

[daphnissov]

So I take it by the BoM you posted that you're planning on rolling your own rather than buying? If your budget is 15-20K, you should be able to buy something that is officially supported by the VMware HCL, which would probably put you in a better position to start.

[menace133780]

Thank you for your answer, although I don`t understand it completely. What do you mean with "BoM"?

For sure, the server I'm planning to buy will be a "regular" Dell, HP, Fujitsu or whatever one. I'm not going to build the thing myself.

Because I don't know what server brand I will finally get, I only posted the main hardware details for asking if they are a good choice for my planned use case.

[daphnissov]

BoM = Build of Materials

Just make sure whatever you get is supported on the HCL. But it sounds like you've chosen a decent setup despite knowing little about your intentions. In your budget make sure you've thought about backup and any DR that may be necessary. Since it appears you're using a local datastore, you'll need the ability to protect those VMs running on that host.

[menace133780]

Ah, ok. Now it gets clearer, Thank you

The backup will be done by a physically windows server with Veeam B&R with an attached NAS storage (big datacenter NAS). There for I planned the necessary "VMware vSphere Essentials Kit" license.

However, I will keep an eye on the HCL when I'm sure which server brand I will get.

Last question is the storage for the ESXi host OS itself. What is the most common space to install des host OS to? The main data store? Or a separate RAID Array or LUN?

In the past, I read something about installing the OS on a flash drive should be best practice. However, since the fault tolerance of flash drives (SD-Cards, USB Sticks, etc.) I'm not very confident with this.

[daphnissov]

Since you're going to be using local storage anyway, it's probably simplest if you carve out an additional small LUN (maybe 16 GB) and use that as the ESXi installation drive. You can certainly use flash memory (USB or SD cards), but if you do ensure you get good, reliable cells from a reputable manufacturer.