VMWare official best practices for this use case

[dgingeri]

I've been tasked with getting official recommendations for how to handle our specific circumstances, and I have not been able to find anything.  VMWare tech support has been near silent in the ticket I submitted, instead choosing to forward responsibility on to licensing support.  Our reseller hasn't given me any decent response, or even a price quote relating to what we need.  Google searches have brought up best practices guides, but they just seem to be more marketing materials than anything useful. 

So, here's the situation:

We have a 2 machine cluster with vSphere Essentials Plus 5.5.  Currently each host only has local storage, and yet my predecessor set them up in a cluster.  Since it couldn't do any failover in case one host failed, we are (finally) getting some centralized storage soon.  Even with this, we don't have enough memory on one host to keep all the VMs at maximum, and we have some VMs that are absolutely necessary to keep at 100%.  Some will have memory swapped out.  There is no way around that.  So, my boss had me give some recommendations and asked for the official best practices for such things.

Here is what I have:

Option 1 (my main recommendation): Get more memory so we can get all the VMs up on one host.  We would need 256GB of memory on each host.

Option 2 (my backup position): Set memory reservations on the most important VMs to make sure they get what they need.  Also, set CPU shares to high on those same VMs.

Option 3 (my boss's suggestion): Use DRS and resource pools to automate the resource reservations for the high priority VMs.  Of course, this requires upgrading to vCenter Standard and vSphere Enterprise Plus, and that is expensive.  I asked CDW for a quote, only to have the sales guy hook me up with their VMWare specialist to tell me it will be a big cost, and then not send me a quote.  So, I can't give my boss any feedback on this one.  (Really annoying in that it would cost us $3000 to get the memory, and about $17,000 for the E+ licenses, but he wouldn't listen to me.) 

I can find no documentation to back up any of these positions, and my boss wants it.  Advice?

[continuum]

VMware documentation for scenarios like yours is very poor.
With 2 hosts and no shared storage every investment in more vCenter features is wasted.
Using a cluster with no shared storage makes zero sense.
Your problem  are not  eventual cosmetical performance issues but the high risk of data loss.
With local storage you are forced to use VMFS for your datastores.
One power failure and your data may be lost.
What you need is more physical RAM and a few thousand bucks for a decent machine that can act as a Linux NFS-server.
VMware official best practice is written for guys that have the pockets to think as big as VMware suggests.
vSphere is only enterprise ready if you have the money and hardware to run shared storage and at least have a daily backup solution in place.
If you are not willing to invest enough money to buy that minimum you better do NOT read best practice documentation as it gives you bad ideas.
My suggestions for small environments like yours:
- only use eager zeroed thick vmdks
- write down the mapping for each vmdk after you created it
- allways wipe new datastores with zeroes before you partition to VMFS
- NEVER fill up datastores to more than 90%
- allways rebuild datastores from scratch after you filled them up
- use UPS power supply

- avoid ESXi 6 or later if possible
- do not use automatic backup tools like Veeam if you are not willing to also run daily monitoring tools and if you are not willing to check your backups daily
- invest the first available money in a powerful NFS-server that uses a non cutting-edge filesystem
- make sure that all your admins know how to work with WinSCP and Putty
- do not upgrade VMFS-versions on the fly
- DO NOT USE LOCAL STORAGE WITH RAID 5

All this suggestions are based on real live experiences of my recovery customers and often contradict suggestions you would read in best practice tips.
Ulli