Hi all; I am VERY new to Vmware......
I have just taken delivery of a Dell server to run vmware on for a customer. Given the seemingly heinous cost of Dell storage, I am guessing that the best way is to use a Synology NAS for shared stores. The likely maximum for this setup is 2 physical hosts.
Based in my assumption of Dell disks being so expensive, can one use other disks internally to the Dell? Or will it only play well with Dell drives? I propose to use a Kingston SSD on the host for the esxi install. It seems a lot of folks use a USB stick for the install (using Rufus), installing esxi onto the USB as a boot disk. I cannot seem to work out the rights and wrongs of this....
A lot of the videos on youtube use vlan to route traffic from the esxi host to the NAS. Is it not simpler to just use another Gb switch and connect from a NIC on the initial host to a port (or ports?) on the synology? Will this give me enough speed to use the NAS as a store? On addition of another host I would propose to simply plug it into the dedicated store switch and configure accordingly to see the shared store.
More fundamentally, is the VMWare essentials license enough to run a small production environment? Cost is an issue, but I dont want to short change the customer by making the initial setup too bare-bones.
Apologies if these questions are too basic; I have to start somewhere, and the customer is not expecting immediate results (which is a good thing!!)