New Server Build w/ESXi 6.7

[C4nn4b1sK1ng]

Have two clients that want to go joint together on a server. Just looking for another set of eyes

VM-HOST-01

T440 Dell Tower Server

Intel® Xeon® Silver 4108 1.8G, 8C/16T, 9.6GT/s, 11M Cache, Turbo, HT (85W) DDR4-2400

48GB RDIMM 2666MT/s Single Rank
RAID 10 for HDDs or SSDs in pairs (Matching Type/Speed/Capacity) - this will be for the data lun

PERC H330 RAID Controller

[8] 1TB 7.2K RPM SATA 6Gbps 512n 3.5in Hot-plug Hard Drive

VMware ESXi 6.7 U1 Embedded Image on Flash Media

[2} Windows Server®2016, Standard Ed,Secondary OS, No MEDIA,16 CORE

[2] 5-pack of Windows Server 2016 Remote Desktop Services, USER

ISDM and Combo Card Reader with 16GB VFlash SD & 16GB microSDHC/SDXC Card

iDrac9, Basic

On-Board Broadcom 5720 Dual Port 1Gb LOM

Secondary Broadcom 5720 Dual Port 1Gb Network Interface Card

Dual, Hot-plug, Redundant Power Supply (1+1), 495W

Redundant Fan with Fresh Air Cooling Option

UEFI BIOS Boot Mode with GPT Partition

Company A Requirements:
CA-SRV-01 DC/DB/FS (quickbooks db, xactimate db)

2 cores 8GB ram 80GB partition

CA-RDS-01 (5 users)

2 cores 16GB ram 80GB partition

Company B Requirements:
CB-SRV-01 DC/DB/FS (quickbooks db, logistics software db)

2 cores 8GB ram 80GB partition

CB-RDS-01 (5 users)

2 cores 16GB ram 80GB partition

Onboard SDCard to boot esxi 6.7
RAID 10 for data storage 8x1TB (arrays of 4 discs - 1 array per company)

2x1TB hot spares

On paper it looks good to me. I have supported medical practices ts environments but never hosted the DB segment of it as thier services were all hosted via the cloud. Everything these clients will be utilizing will be on premise with this vm-host. Employee growth is not expected to exceed another 2-3 people (6 users total) for both companies. The server has enough room to grow excluding that its a single socket server. So upgrading would be easy as just the proc would require replacing and re provisioning resources.

Just looking for opinions, I appreciate the extra set of eyes.

[IRIX201110141]

Veto!

- The H330 have no battery backed cache. Which mean no WriteBack.. only WriteTrough... so its dog slow when writing

- Never use SATA or NLSAS for production store. Use 10K SAS or SSD

- We always use the Dual SD Card setup....but we have diskless servers with SAN. If you already have lokal raid disks why not creation a small 20G Virtual Disk on the PERC?

- Legacy Software is often single threaded... a CPU with a base clock of 1.8Ghz isnt a high performer

Regards,

Joerg

[daphnissov]

I agree with Joerg here. The H330 is awful and don't buy it. Get a good-quality storage controller instead with battery-backed cache. 7.2K SATA drives should be banished from ESXi as even in RAID-10 the random write performance (snapshot commit, anyone?) is going to tank I/Os. SAS or SSD (and not consumer-grade SSDs either) I also think 48 GB of memory is too skinny for this, given how affordable memory is these days. If you have the bays, I would probably skip even the SD card routine and put ESXi on a single drive. This is the only place a 7.2K SATA drive should be used. Make sure that anything and everything you're considering is on the HCL and supported for the target version of ESXi.

[C4nn4b1sK1ng]

...and this is why I posted. Thank you folks for your helpful insight. I'm going to update the build and Ill post back tomorrow.

[C4nn4b1sK1ng]

Updated build

VM-HOST-01

T440 Dell Tower Server

Intel® Xeon® Silver 4108 1.8G, 8C/16T, 9.6GT/s, 11M Cache, Turbo, HT (85W) DDR4-2400

Intel® Xeon® Silver 4110 2.1G, 8C/16T, 9.6GT/s, 11M Cache, Turbo, HT (85W) DDR4-2400

[3] 16GB RDIMM 2666MT/s Single Rank

[2] ​32GB RDIMM, 2666MT/s, Dual Rank (this actually saved $190 over 4/16GB)
RAID 10 for HDDs or SSDs in pairs (Matching Type/Speed/Capacity)

PERC H330 RAID Controller

PERC H730P RAID Controller, 2GB NV Cache, Adapter, Full Height

[8] 1TB 7.2K RPM SATA 6Gbps 512n 3.5in Hot-plug Hard Drive

[8] 600GB 10K RPM SAS 12Gbps 512n 2.5in Hot-plug Hard Drive, 3.5in HYB CARR (15k SAS drives will put the server too far over budget)

VMware ESXi 6.7 U1 Embedded Image on Flash Media

[2} Windows Server®2016, Standard Ed,Secondary OS, No MEDIA,16 CORE (4 VM's)

[2] 5-pack of Windows Server 2016 Remote Desktop Services, USER (5 per terminal server)

ISDM and Combo Card Reader with 16GB VFlash SD & 16GB microSDHC/SDXC Card

iDrac9, Basic

On-Board Broadcom 5720 Dual Port 1Gb LOM

Secondary Broadcom 5720 Dual Port 1Gb Network Interface Card

Dual, Hot-plug, Redundant Power Supply (1+1), 495W

Redundant Fan with Fresh Air Cooling Option

UEFI BIOS Boot Mode with GPT Partition

[C4nn4b1sK1ng]

Thanks daphnissov​ IRIX201110141​

I want to keep the esxi on the sd cards. The tower is only going to have 8 bays and I would like to have two functional RAID 10 arrays. Each company will have thier own array as I prefer them to be on separate datastore's. I dont see them growing to the point to where they will need to move storage to a SAN in the near future. If they do, fantastic

I priced out the 16 bay tower however the 2.5in drives are just too expensive unfortunately.

[IRIX201110141]

Please choose the PERC 730p or better 740 when its available in the T440.  2 independent RAID10 diskgroups means just 2 spinning drives per array which provides the IOPS (2x ~200). I suggest a raid5.7 + HS (~600 IOPS) with all disks and than you can create 2 virtual disk (each for one company).

Regards,

Joerg

[daphnissov]

That's all fine but, again as Joerg said, you need to ditch that H330. If that takes you over budget then you'll have to tell your customer(s) there's a cost to doing virtualization the correct way. That's just life. As a side note, I hope you've planned a proper backup strategy for the VMs that will reside on this host.

[C4nn4b1sK1ng]

I updated it the H730 on the build page but left it out of the update here by accident.

[C4nn4b1sK1ng]

We use Shadow Protect for our backup services. The servers will be receiving hourly backups to a QNAP NAS, which then backup to the cloud at night.