Small company, small budget! I am looking at a used Dell PowerEdge R710 to be used for a Veeam replication partner and a few Windows desktop VM's. I have never run ESXi off SATA but to maximize storage and keep costs low I would be configuring with 2TB NL-SAS 7.2K drives in a 4 drive RAID 10 array.
The primary reason for deployment (off site) is more of an insurance policy in the event of a failure of our production ESXi 5 host. And if pressed into production (two or three rather low duty mission critical servers) it would only be for the time it would take to get our production ESXi server back online. I wouldn't expect great performance but I also wouldn't want to consider if performance would be terrible.
I would appreciate any suggestions or comments on running ESXi 5.0/5.1 on NL-SAS for a replication target and production host insurance.