Hardware Selection Assistance

[bluelinenetwork]

Hello all,

I am planning a vSphere setup and I have a few questions, mainly regarding storage. The budget isn't ready for an iSCSI or FC disk array so I was looking at a NFS box from Dell configured with 4 gb nic ports, running server 2008 storage server.

VM's will consist of a couple Server 2003 installations with the biggest app being a MS Dynamics app with about 14 employees accessing data.

Does anyone have pro's or con's about this setup? Is NFS an ok option for storing VM's and Data? Or preferred for just data?

Thanks

Travis

[rManic]

How many ESX and How many VM's are you planned for?

How critical your servers in case of failure either storage or ESX server?

regards

Manic

[bluelinenetwork]

Without the server....the office comes to a screaching halt. Which is why I would like to do this with 3 ESXi hosts managment server using HA (or FT) and the dell NAS/NFS. I think with the 4x1gb nics performance should be ok.

With 6 disks in raid 5, dataloss should be minimal baring natural disaster.

My biggest question is on the performance? (Not that it could be any worse than our current servers)

[rManic]

4 x1Gbps is ok to create shared datastore across 3 ESXi. also keep in mind network utilization and i/o request of your server while deciding H/W for ESX and storage

regards

Manic

[Rumple]

I would also suggest you go down a physical host, beef up the 2 hosts and then look at an ISCSI storage solution like the IBM DS series any of the Dell series...some of them can be had for 5-10k...which is almost in line with the purchase price of the servers themselves. Plan it carefully and work with an account rep and you might even get all that for under 20k...