I was hoping the experts here can help guide me in the proper direction for a virtualized solution running StarWind V-SAN on a single Dell Server with the option later adding a second server?
We have been utilizing Windows Server 2012 Essentials and it is time to replace our server. We are a small organization of 23 users but we expect to grow to possible 30-40 in the next 12-24 months. We would like to go virtualization but we have zero experience in an VM environment. I think Dell is trying to oversell us on hardware and software but we have a small tight budget and I don't think we need as much as Dell is trying to sell us.
Dell was proposing Windows Server 2016 Standard on their VRTX chassis with a 10Gb switch module with two Poweredge M630 blades with a SAN integrated into the VRTX chassis. Each of the M630 blade servers in the VRTX chassis are configured with SSD and raw storage of 4TBs. Each blade is licensed for 2 VMs along with 30-cals. Storage was with 4 1TB 7.2K NLSAS 512n mixed-use hard drives. Memory was 16GB RDIMMs. He also included redundant internal SD modules for a VMware hypervisor if we decided to go in that direction. The quote did not offer any High Availability or Fault Tolerance. The quote came in at $27K. Can this be done cheaper and better?
What hardware would we possibly need to virtualize. RAID 5,6 or 10? 1 or 2 CPUs? VMware, or Hyper-V? Raid controller? Memory and storage. I believe our IOPS we around 495 - 600 from a calculator we used.
I like the thought of having the DC, DNS and DHCP on 1 VM and Storage/Database on another. StarWind Free and Veeam Free look great but I have no experience with those options but researching. We would like to stay with 1 server for now if possible to keep the cost down with the possibility of adding another server later. Also High Availability and Fault Tolerance would be great but I think I would have to have 2 servers for that?
VDI was also brought up in the conversation and if we could utilize our existing workstations? They loved the thought deploying workstations fast and being able to access from most devices remotely but I heard it wasn't a cost effective solution below 50-users. Is this true or is there a somewhat cheaper way of achieving this?
We currently have 3TB storage but utilize 1TB of that. Our main applications is AutoCAD LT, Office 365, Quickbooks Enterprise and Adobe Acrobat Pro. We currently backup data to a NAS and then backup to the cloud.
I apologize for the long post but any help or information in selecting the proper items that can grow and scale would be greatly appreciated.
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