Good day everyone my name is David and I have the following questions,
We are starting to prepare for building a small vsphere environment with the following specs.
1. total of 7 guest, 2 in DMZ, and 5 vm's in regular network
2. budget of approximately $40000
3. should have HA
4. don't need DRS
5. shared storage
6. vcenter and 2 esxi hosts 6.7
My questions/concerns are
1. this document from vmware states that minimum 3 hosts are recommended for HA/DRS - vCenter HA Hardware and Software Requirements
2. is this true you need minimum 3 hosts for HA or is it just saying for DRS you need 3 hosts?
3. What is the best solution for low budget decent performing shared storage?
4. do you recommend vsan for storage on a small setup? is it expensive?
5. A friend of mine was saying not to use HA and just use vsphere replication to copy vm's to second host in 15 minute intervals, I don't like this idea because of the significant extra disk I/O's and much less flexibility when it comes to patching and failover etc..., is this a legit approach to a poor mans HA?
6. Would you consider hosts with only 1 cpu? the vm's wont be real cpu hungry but I want good performance. (this might be to difficult to answer)
I appreciate any assistance you can proved.
Thank you.