Small ESX build

[ProgramsWithFortran]

I'm looking to possibly build a small 2 node ESX 6 cluster with a FreeNAS backend to support a remote office. I'm only going to run a handful of VMs on it, but it does need to be as redundant as I can make it. I know this setup will still have the NAS itself as a single point of failure, but I should be able to cannibalize one of the ESX servers in the event of the NAS blowing up since they will all be running the same server hardware. The odds of multiple drive failures at once should be low, though I have enough storage I could configure a hot spare. I've read through most of the newbie guides and I think this will work but I would feel better if you guys would give the config a once over before I give it a shot.

The config:

3 HP ProLiant ML10 V2
12 8GB DDR3 1866 ECC UDIMM
6 WL 4TB 7200RPM 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5
2 SanDisk SSD PLUS 2.5" 120GB
1 SilverStone SDP08 2 x 2.5" to 3.5" Bay Converter
3 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833824018&cm_re=Chelsio-_-33-824-018-_-Product]Chelsio High Performance, Dual Port 10 GbE[/url]
1 LSI SAS 9211-8i 8-port 6Gb/s PCI-E
1 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817997007]SilverStone SDP08 2 x 2.5" to 3.5" Bay Converter[/url]

I'm maxing out all 3 servers with 32GB of ECC RAM, and using the SSDs as the boot volume for the NAS. I figured I could boot from iSCSI for the ESX nodes and use the 2 SSDs to boot the NAS. The ESX nodes would be connected to the NAS via the 10GbE cards and the users in the office would connect to the NAS via the builtin Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5720 for their file shares.

I think I can put this together for around $3k. (I already have the ESX and iLO licenses)

 

[bigphil]

Don't forget about the sata forward breakout cables you'll need for your drives in the NAS. For VM storage you should use mirrored vdevs and you'll want to set the zfs option "sync=always" on your datasets/zvols. I'd also highly recommend a good SLOG device and make sure it has power loss protection and low latency (e.g. Intel DC S3700 is a good option). If it were me, I'd not waste the money on the sandisk ssd's for boot. Just use a good USB stick as the boot device (both freenas and ESXi boxes), regularly save the configs to a safe place and have a spare USB stick handy. you could rebuild and restore the config in 10 minutes if the boot device ever crapped out. I have a similar setup for my home lab but have two FreeNAS boxes setup with replication, so if one blows out I can heat up the other and be back up and running quickly. Another thing I did is provision a management vm on each ESXi host to use local storage on the host (obviously requires a local disk on each host). That way I can still get access to the location while remote if any of the boxes go out as that vm is essentially standalone. It sucks not having true HA for storage, but this setup makes it pretty decent for a home lab and could work for you.