Hello,
I´m planning for a VMware VSAN setup (VDI with full VMs for about 200-250 office Windows 8.1 clients). I read (too) many recommendations about hardware, too.
some assumptions:
- I do not need any real SAN, i.e. 3Par
- I do not need 2 or 4 RAID controllers. Neither with caching, nor with a battery
- I do not need SSD only disk shelves => I need enough cache
- I do not need SAS drives
- I do need enterprise hardware
- I do not need redundancy within one node
- one whole node can happily break away. It doesn´t matter within that VMware VSAN cluster
- I´d like some good high availability
- I actually do not know whether I need something like NVIDIA´s GRID K1/K2 card. Will the cluster go down, when 10/50/100/200/250 of my users run google earth?
So, here it is, a first built:
8 nodes with
16x Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2, 12x 2.70GHz (192 cores, 518 GHz)
4 TB ECC Reg RAM
25.6 TB SSD (2.5“, SATA3, TBW: 14950TB)
160 TB HDD (2.5“, SATA3, 10000rpm, SATA3, NRRE: <10 in 10^16.)
So remember, instead of VMware VSAN the alternative would be to buy something like a HP 3Par. (One of our partners offered us a 3Par/DL380p G8 based setup with Vsphere/Citrix, the other one took similar hardware and suggests Vsphere/Unidesk. We asked both for a VDI setup. Well, they are both HP partners...)
It would be great if you give some hints.