I'm running a production Dell R710 box, ESXi 5
Dual X5570, 2.9 Gig 4 cores per socket
96 Gig DD3 Ram
Perc 6/i controller
6 300GB SAS drives in a RAID 10 Array with 2 hot spares.
My first thought is the biggest improvement will come from SSD Storage. It's not worth upgrading the R710, since I'd have to stick an H700 card in it to get 6Gbps instead of 3 (which is cheap) but then when new drives are added, the cost difference to go to a 620 1u with a newer CPU, etc... is negligible. Plus, VmWare beyond 5.5 is not supported on the R710.
The R620 would have 128GB DDR3, 8 x 800 GB 6Gbps SSD, Dual E5-2667 V2 3.2 8 Core.
The R630 will take the same CPU, but V4 instead. CPU cost is an extra $300 over the V2. Considering these were over 2K each when released, that's negligible now.
Where costs start to go up is having to use DDR4 Ram instead of DDR3, and the consideration of 12Gbps drives as opposed to 6Gbps.
Another factor in favor of the V4 chip is Esxi 7 is supported, whereas it only goes up to 6.5 on the V2. But... I've been relatively happy with 5.1 and do not need all the extra crap thrown in. It'd be nice if they offered vMotion in the essentials package, but I'm not paying 5K for it. $500 is fair enough for what it does and to unlock the crippled API's to be able to back up.
So the main questions are:
1) How big of a difference will moving to 12Gbps drives as opposed to 6Gbps make?
2) Increase in performance for DDR4 vs DDR3?
3) For S&G, how big of a difference would NVMe drives make over the other two options?
I'm going to continue to keep the SSD's in a 6 drive RAID 10 array with 2 hot spares. I understand most people use RAID5, but with such low storage needs, the cost difference is negligible. That's one of the reasons I'm wondering if the jump to 12Gbps will be noticeable.
The VM Workload is a mix. A few CENTOS boxes running webservers, a mysql server, pfsense firewall, and one Windows box running IIS / SQL Server, which will eventually ported over to LAMP to avoid MS licensing issues if/when the Windows boxes need upgrades. They are 2008 Server R2 and would just be copied over for now.
Dual X5570, 2.9 Gig 4 cores per socket
96 Gig DD3 Ram
Perc 6/i controller
6 300GB SAS drives in a RAID 10 Array with 2 hot spares.
My first thought is the biggest improvement will come from SSD Storage. It's not worth upgrading the R710, since I'd have to stick an H700 card in it to get 6Gbps instead of 3 (which is cheap) but then when new drives are added, the cost difference to go to a 620 1u with a newer CPU, etc... is negligible. Plus, VmWare beyond 5.5 is not supported on the R710.
The R620 would have 128GB DDR3, 8 x 800 GB 6Gbps SSD, Dual E5-2667 V2 3.2 8 Core.
The R630 will take the same CPU, but V4 instead. CPU cost is an extra $300 over the V2. Considering these were over 2K each when released, that's negligible now.
Where costs start to go up is having to use DDR4 Ram instead of DDR3, and the consideration of 12Gbps drives as opposed to 6Gbps.
Another factor in favor of the V4 chip is Esxi 7 is supported, whereas it only goes up to 6.5 on the V2. But... I've been relatively happy with 5.1 and do not need all the extra crap thrown in. It'd be nice if they offered vMotion in the essentials package, but I'm not paying 5K for it. $500 is fair enough for what it does and to unlock the crippled API's to be able to back up.
So the main questions are:
1) How big of a difference will moving to 12Gbps drives as opposed to 6Gbps make?
2) Increase in performance for DDR4 vs DDR3?
3) For S&G, how big of a difference would NVMe drives make over the other two options?
I'm going to continue to keep the SSD's in a 6 drive RAID 10 array with 2 hot spares. I understand most people use RAID5, but with such low storage needs, the cost difference is negligible. That's one of the reasons I'm wondering if the jump to 12Gbps will be noticeable.
The VM Workload is a mix. A few CENTOS boxes running webservers, a mysql server, pfsense firewall, and one Windows box running IIS / SQL Server, which will eventually ported over to LAMP to avoid MS licensing issues if/when the Windows boxes need upgrades. They are 2008 Server R2 and would just be copied over for now.