Hi,
I have some old pc's and some newly aquired pc's. My goal is to setup a home lab consisting of (2-3) esxi/esx 4.1 hosts and a Starwind SAN/Vcenter on a windows 2008 r2 box. I would like to utilize HA, DRS, Vmotion, Multipathing etc....
My hardware is:
1 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+ /16 GB RAM /2 -Intel Gig NICs + 1 Gig Realteck NIC
1 Core 2 Duo 3Ghz /8 GB RAM(Maxed out as per motherboard specs) /5 Gig NICs + 1 gig Realtech NIC
1 Core i3-550 3.20 Ghz 4MB cache /16 GB RAM /5 Intel Gig NICs
1 Core i5-2500k Sandy Bridge 3.3Ghz Quad Core /16GB /5 Intel Gig NICs
2 x Cisco Small Business SLM2008T-NA 10/100/1000Mbps SG200-08 Gigabit Ethernet Switch (2 SAN only multipathing switching) 16 ports total
4 x sata II 500 GB drives (Not all the same 3 western digital + 1 Seagate) for some RAID on the SAN
4 x SSD system boot drives for the esxi/esx hosts and the 2008r2 vcenter/starwind SAN box
1 APC Backup for power
My main concern is which computer to use for the SAN/Vcenter as I would like to use the max memory for my vmware cluster and not the SAN. I would also like the best senario for Vmotion as I have heard there can be issues with cpu families not allowing Vmotion.
Any comments/suggestions would be appreciated.
Thank you.