We have a VMware essentials plus license and are looking to buy 3 or 4 Poweredge 720s in the next month. It's Dell's end of year so I have to order within the next few weeks.
A little about our company... 115 users, with no more then 90 users at a time. None of our current servers are pushed very hard whether they are physical or virtual. I've never spent much time with performance benchmarks because of our size. We are going to retire Poweredge 1950s, and replace with the 720s are try to virtualize as much as possible. We also have a few R610's that we're going to use for our small citrix farm.
1 goal worth mentioning... we have about 1 1/2 rack space that we rent at our data center. Goal is to get to 1 rack and keep the power costs down.
Here's the R720 that I've configured so far....
(2) Intel® Xeon® E5-2630L 2.00GHz, 15M Cache, 7.2GT/s QPI, Turbo, 6C, 60W, Max Mem 1333MHz *** might bump up to an 8Core processor***
2.5" Chassis with up to 16 Hard Drives
4GB RDIMM, 1333 MT/s, Low Volt, Single Rank, x4 Data Width ********** recommendations on single or dual rank? or x4 or x8 data width? **************
we will order more memory through Crucial.com
Broadcom 5720 QP 1Gb Network Daughter Card
(8) 300GB 10K RPM SAS 6Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Hard Drive
Dual, Hot-plug, Redundant Power Supply (1+1), 1100W
********The Big Question:
RAID? For maximum growth and performance potential... Should I outfit the server with Dual H710P 1GB cache cards? Is this overkill? Can I get by with 1 - H710 card with 1gb cache?
Anyone with R720's care to share with how many VMs they are running along with RAID card, # of spindles, and RAID type? How they are splitting up their spindles? Are you using 2 for the Hypervisor, then breaking off into sets of 4 and RAID 10?