I need a little help in how to figure out how I want to set up my systems. I will be starting classes next month for getting into IT, after being out of school for 20+ years. Currently at home I am setting up a homelab so that I can test out different things with the gear I have. As of now I have:
x3 Dell R710's (two that uses 6 3.5" drives, and the other 8 2.5" drives)
x1 Dell R610
and a server I built from scratch which has a total of 16TB Raw storage (on 9260 8i RAID controller) and 8TB Raw on the motherboard controller. I have 4 NICS in each server and I also have Infiniband dual port 20GB cards I could possibly use for each node as well for iSCSI traffic and VM migration (waiting on the cables).
The two primary nodes will run Server 2016 with the Hyper-V role installed, and I could use the drive bays on the server to do OBR10 on the drives (all 2TB drives right now).
Here's where I am stuck at as to what to use. I want to set up a Hyper-V cluster with possibly 2 nodes (the R710's) with maybe adding an 3rd node with the scratch built server. I have media and video files on an unRAID server that I plan to decommission and move those files to one of the new server. I could create an iSCSI target on the scratch box with Server 2016's own tools and use that as shared storage (being mindful of the SPOF)....or,
I could try using StarWind vSAN to combine the storage from all three nodes into one, which seems ideal. However, though I did get the Free version with the 30 day GUI limit about 2 months ago I was not able to set anything up at that time due to circumstances and now that the GUI part expired as of last month I have to work with the CLI via PS. Unfortunately I am not well versed in using CLI so it may be a struggle for me in trying to set it up that method, and there's no online help (that I am aware of) in the PS commands used to set it up and administer.
I don't know what it will run cost-wise to re-enable the GUI, but since I will be a returning student I want to try to learn as much as I can with my own hardware. If I was able to use StarWind on three nodes for combined storage that would be great, and I can make use of all the drive bays in the servers. I've already pretty much read on setting up the cluster, quorum, etc.
May have more questions soon, but wanted to get past this roadblock. I'm ready to get something going so I can retire my big 4U servers (and possible re-purpose them for something else). Any help would be great.
Thanks!
