Ideas for ESXi SAN

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Half Jaw Elite

Member
Jun 10, 2015
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Toronto, ON, CAN
Greetings everyone,

Hope you're all having a good day so far. I am looking for ideas on suggested builds or pre-built systems that can facilitate the needs for an all SSD SAN for my current VMware ESXi home lab setup.

The SAN server needs to meet the below requirements for this home lab use:
- 2 or 4 SATA 6.0 ports
- 2 or 4 SATA 3.0 ports
- 1 Quad core CPU
- 4 DDR3 DIMM slots (minimum)
- 1 PCI-e 16x slot (minimum 2.0) but preferably 1 16x and 1 8x PCI-e 3.0
- single port gigabit NIC (plus IPMI for remote mgmt port) but preferably quad port gigabit NIC (IPMI or remote mgmt port)

Currently I have two ESXi 5.5 U3b hosts with local SSD's running with a QNAP NAS for secondary NFS storage on WD Red's. each server has Xeon E3-1230 v2 CPU's with 32 GB RAM and quad port NIC's (plus dual port NIC card for vMotion).

I'm looking to add 10GbE or 40Gb Infiniband cards to the servers and the SAN for high speed connection for storage use only, hence the need for PCI-e 8x or 16x on the SAN. I'll also be deploying FreeNAS on the system so ZFS will be used on both the SSD's and HDD's.

I would appreciate any ideas you may have on suggested builds or pre-built systems for me that can fulfill my needs.
 
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Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
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Supermicro | Products | SuperServers | Mini-ATX | 5028D-TN4T

Xeon-D and pretty sure it's on the VMware certified list, small, Low power, plenty of memory and cpu cores and 10g copper network built in.
That's probably the closest prebuilt system I can think of but as you mentioned easy to get a Lenovo, dell, HP, smaller server and add the network card if needed.
 
H

Half Jaw Elite

Member
Jun 10, 2015
33
0
6
35
Toronto, ON, CAN
Evan said:
Supermicro | Products | SuperServers | Mini-ATX | 5028D-TN4T

Xeon-D and pretty sure it's on the VMware certified list, small, Low power, plenty of memory and cpu cores and 10g copper network built in.
That's probably the closest prebuilt system I can think of but as you mentioned easy to get a Lenovo, dell, HP, smaller server and add the network card if needed.
Click to expand...
Any ideas on specific pre-built servers from Dell, HP, or IBM?
 
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