What is the advantage of splitting the 6 drives amongst 3 hosts instead of 2 if I'm using a FTT of 1 and don't need re-protect ability for this cluster? If I was to put 2 of the Hitachi's in all 3 nodes, how much usable storage space would that give me with a FTT of 1? I used the vSAN Datastore calculator linked on Yellow-Bricks but you have to know how many VMs and the average size of each for the calculator to work and that I'm not sure of at this point. Also, can you think of any good uses for the 4 Intel 730s I have laying around in this vSAN cluster?
Good call on checking the licensing because I certainly can't really afford any more than the VMUG membership with regard to licensing considering how much I'm putting into my network hardware. So yes, if VMUG doesn't provide vSAN cluster licensing than I will have to go the dedicated storage appliance route.
You'd have roughly 2.4 TB of vSAN storage when everything is healthy vSAN-wise and would drop down to 1.6GB roughly if a host failed or needed maintenance in a 3-node vSAN config if your suggesting using 2 of the hussl4040ass600 drives in each host contributing to vSAN.
My vote, go w/ the 3-node vSAN config initially, if it meets your needs keep it, if not go back to dedicated stg appliance running in a VM driving those 6 hitachi hussl dev's and served up to the vSphere cluster...no sense in COMPLETELY dedicating a storage node IMHO unless that gives ya a warm/fuzzy feeling v.s. a vt-D HBA passthru to a stg appliance VM...else you can always go back to 2-node ROBO vSAN w/ witness appliance...you have options good sir, test them all out and let us know your findings or end-state utopia.
HELL, you could even got 2-node vSAN w/ witness, just use those 4 phys ssd disks, the witness will take a few hundred GB vdisk if memory serves me correct, and STILL use a virtualized/vt-D stg appliance w/ those last two ssd drives as read/write cache and throw a small handful of magnetics in the mix w/ those on OmniOS/FreeNAS/etc., serve up to vSphere cluseter over preferred protocol (NFS/iSCSI) and be happy as a pig in sh|t...balls to the wall perf on AFA vSAN, capacity while still giving some good performance on the hybrid array on that 3rd ESXi host, throw that guy in same cluster as 2node-vSAN to consume/provide both stg platforms...
Just saying'...your limitations are only your imagination currently, you will have some legit gear when you get those three Xeon-D nodes built out buddy with what you already have!
Careful...it's a slippery slope sir...you all know what I mean :-D
BWAHAHAHA