Need Storage Advice for home lab setup

[Deathbysnusnoo]

Hello All,

I am building a new home lab server, (trying to study for my MCSA). Below is my current ideas

Antec 1200 case (already have)
SuperMicro MBD-X10DAI E-ATX Mobo
EVGA 220-G2-0850-XR 80+ Gold 850W
Xeon E5-2630 v3 @2.4
Kingston 32GB (8x4) 288 Pin DDR4
Some brand of Graphics card, either GTX 970 or Radeon 380

My questions fall in two fold, I am debating on storage and could use some advice. I am not sure if I want to get 3 WD Red drives with a 256GB SSD caching drive OR if I should get 3 WD Black drives. I am also debating what hypervisor to use with that storage setup. I am thinking either UnRaid in btrfs and VMWare in RAID 5, both state they can use drives for caching but I am unaware of how effective it is in either case.

Either way I want to set up at least 4 VM's
Server 2012 standard (debating on putting exchange on it)
Apache Server
Ubuntu
Windows 10 - Plan on giving HWpassthrough a go and trying to make this a gaming vm for daughter/steam link use)

I am a network admin for several small businesses around my small city and I think it is time to step up and really get some more letters behind my name but usually I run standard Dell Servers and Hyper-v in the office so I want to broaden my horizons. Any thoughts from the masters on the storage/vm combo would be greatly appreciated.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817438018

 

[Deleted member 88227]

Black drives are a waste of money. Go with the Red drives. As for a caching drive, it will most likely be a waste. Unless you're doing intensive I/O operations on the storage then you wont notice it. Having a boot drive that's SSD will tremendously help speed up boot time assuming you're not loading any sort of RAID on boot as that'll slow down boot times.

I would go with more RAM than just 32GB though.

 

[Benzino]

At one point I had 4 WD Black drives in my home ESXi rig. It generated a lot of noise and heat. I agree with Skillz on the SSD caching, not worth it. I do SSDs in my ESXi box, they are cheap and with thin provisioning you should be fine. I stopped doing RAID in my ESXi box a long time ago because if something happens, oh well, its a home lab, blow it away and start over.

 

[Deathbysnusnoo]

Black drives are a waste of money. Go with the Red drives. As for a caching drive, it will most likely be a waste. Unless you're doing intensive I/O operations on the storage then you wont notice it. Having a boot drive that's SSD will tremendously help speed up boot time assuming you're not loading any sort of RAID on boot as that'll slow down boot times.

I would go with more RAM than just 32GB though.

Thanks for the advice, I was thinking about hosting a few game servers for my brother and his friend but that would really be the most extensive IO that this server would do. I will stick with the red's w/o cache drive. Why do you think I should have more ram? I was thinking around 16 for Server, 8 for Win 10 machine, and then 2-4 for the others as I just want them running and to play with them from time to time.

 

[Deathbysnusnoo]

At one point I had 4 WD Black drives in my home ESXi rig. It generated a lot of noise and heat. I agree with Skillz on the SSD caching, not worth it. I do SSDs in my ESXi box, they are cheap and with thin provisioning you should be fine. I stopped doing RAID in my ESXi box a long time ago because if something happens, oh well, its a home lab, blow it away and start over.

Raid was conisidered but i am not sure if it is worth the headache, That was part of the reason I am considering UnRaid, it looks like a decent hypervisor and it will do BtrFS on its own. I wish I could do all SSD's in the server but budget is a little limited and I do want the storage for media and local machine backups.