HP Z820 ESXi Lab Rig Test Advice

[MikhailCompo]

Hi, Newbie here

I am buying an HP Z820 with 256GB RAM, plus 4x Samsung SSDs for a test lab.

What version of ESXi/vSphere would people recommend for stability? I gather the GPU passthrough is flaky on 6.0 at the moment, but I dont see as many reports about people using 6.5. Is 6.5 beta?

Also, I have been advised to NOT use the onboard RAID on the Z820 and to get an PCIe SATA RAID controller. Can anyone recommend a cheap one with 4 channels that supports SATA?

Cheers for any advice - early stages as you can probably ascertain.........

 

[Peanuthead]

I would use version 6.5 and get SAS card to handle the raid of your solid state drives. Another option is to get a SAS HBA card and pass it through two a storage virtual machine. It's really up to you.

 

[MikhailCompo]

Collecting Z820 on Friday.

Still need to know if I require a RAID/HBA card:

Are they likely to be significantly faster?

As I have no interest in RAID for this project, I am only interested in reliability and performance.

Is an HP Smart Array P420 or an LSI MegaRAID SAS 9270-8i good for this task?

Cheers

 

[Peanuthead]

No interest in RAID but you want performance? I'm not following. What is your definition of performance? It all varies on budget.

 

[MikhailCompo]

Or an HP H240 HBA?

 

[MikhailCompo]

By performance I mean to achieve maximum read and write speeds from the drives