After much research I finally set up ESXI 6.5 on this Dell PowerEdge T710 that I got (for free). Everything up until this point has sort of played out as I expected; Installed ESXI from a USB Stick to another one internally plugged into the motherboard (this system didn't come with the built-in internal SD card slot).
My question at this point is about storage; This server has 8x 3.5 hotswap hard drive bays connected to a Dell SAS 6/iR integrated controller (sadly, no PERC), and it came with 4x 250gb drives and 2x 1tb drives.
I know that the SAS 6/iR can do RAID, but am unsure what would be the best route. My goal is to host a Windows 2008 Server for some basic accounting software shared over MSTSC, a Plex Media Server and two FreePBX instalations.
For the Media end of it I have a Synology ds1813 NAS on which I would like to store all media, but aside from that I ahve no idea what would be the best place to store the VM images and the local data to go along with it.
So from this point on what would some of you with some real virtualization experience do?
My question at this point is about storage; This server has 8x 3.5 hotswap hard drive bays connected to a Dell SAS 6/iR integrated controller (sadly, no PERC), and it came with 4x 250gb drives and 2x 1tb drives.
I know that the SAS 6/iR can do RAID, but am unsure what would be the best route. My goal is to host a Windows 2008 Server for some basic accounting software shared over MSTSC, a Plex Media Server and two FreePBX instalations.
For the Media end of it I have a Synology ds1813 NAS on which I would like to store all media, but aside from that I ahve no idea what would be the best place to store the VM images and the local data to go along with it.
So from this point on what would some of you with some real virtualization experience do?