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Considering this setup:

ESXi 6.5 on HP ProLiant BL460c G7 in an HPE BladeSystem c3000
2 x Intel Xeon CPU E5645 @ 2.4GHz
96 GB Memory
Partnered with SB40c Storage Blade (6 x 240 GB SSD) with HP Smart Array P400 256 MB RAID Storage Controller

The objective is to run a combination of Win10 and Win2k12 servers on this server. My questions are:
1- What kind of VM performance can I expect when it comes to disk read/write speeds?
2- As far as CPU goes, how many VMs can I simultaneously use?
3- Is there a big benefit to using an HP D2200SB Storage blade with Smart Array P410 1GB with the same SSD drives for speed and performance?
4- If this direct attached storage solution is altogether not advised for speed and data integrity, what would you recommend a newbie to use as storage for this VMware environment given my hardware? Please don't spare technical details (exact hardware components needed for SAN) as I've never worked with SAN before

Tom Newton
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3a2roub
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  • It's no longer okay to start new installations with such aged equipment. So, considering this setup, we would advise against using it for this purpose. – ewwhite Dec 09 '22 at 14:03

1 Answers1

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The BL460c G7, SB40c and D2200SB went end of service nearly five years ago, also ESXi 6.5 is now out of support - please don't run production workload on this kit.

To answer your questions;

1 - it'll be fine, presumably you're running those six SSDs in R10 or R6, so expect at least 500MBps of throughput.

2 - 'it depends' - it depends on how many vCPUs you assign and how busy they are - obviously you only have 12 full cores but if the VMs are not busy and you've not created unnecessarily large VMs then you should be able to run VMs totalling 24 x vCPUs, maybe more.

3 - Not much if anything - if your entire cacheable workset fits into 1GB then you'd be better just making sure you've given the VM enough memory to cache it in memory rather than let the disk controller do the heavy lifting.

4 - You only appear to have one, very old, underpowered, server - if so then any form of SAN will just add complexity for no real gain, in fact it'd probably be much slower than this DAS. There's nothing inherently bad in using DAS for a single server, the reason we use shared storage for multi-host clusters is to allow for vMotions/Storage vMotions and HA to work - you have to spend a decent amount of money to get DAS performance from a SAN/NAS.

This all feels like a home lab level of kit and if so then that's fine, but it's not production grade and I'd strongly advise against using it for that.

The best thing to do if you're serious about investing in production-grade kit is to look at the VMware Hardware Compatibility List (https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php) and stick to that.

Chopper3
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  • Thanks a bunch for this detailed answer. This is not a production kit but there is a nagging request to "make the best out of it" without any investment. That being said, how would you recommend upgrading this infrastructure while using the c3000 to accomodate 8 windows 2016 servers and 15 win10 hosts at "blazing speeds"? is it even feasible? – 3a2roub Dec 09 '22 at 14:20
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    I wouldn't use the C3000 at all - it's dead, out of support - and out of date too. Building something that's 'blazing fast' isn't going to be free, also the idea of 'blazing' fast Windows 10 VMs on server hardware is a bit odd - reason being that if I want a fast W10 machine I'm looking at maybe 8-16 cores at 4.5Ghz+ CPUs, whereas server CPUs tend to be 'wider', having many more - but slower - cores. – Chopper3 Dec 09 '22 at 14:56
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    If you have the money then I'd go for something like two x AMD 64/128-core servers, 128GB or more memory, 10/25Gbps NICs and switches and some form of SAN/NAS (make sure you get one with dual-PSUs), then get licenced ESXi and vCenter, run at least v7u3 (v8 is still quite new) - this way you have a production grade setup that's as close to 'blazing fast' as you can get, lots of resilience built in and if you go for 1U servers and maybe a small'ish SAN/NAS then it'll fit into the same amount of space as your C3000. – Chopper3 Dec 09 '22 at 14:56
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    This is incredibly helpful insight, thanks again sir. – 3a2roub Dec 09 '22 at 15:44