My preference would be Lenovo or HP.
I'd consider upping the memory to 128GB or even 256GB depending on what the 5 machines will be doing. Your configuration will, on average give less than 16 GB to each of 5 systems. RAID 5?? Really?? I would go for 15K drives and consider 6 drives, 1 RAID-1 for the base OS and a RAID 10 for the VMs. How big the drives should be dependent on the needs of the 4 VMs. Why 3 NICs? Regards, Hank Arnold Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all. Douglas Adams Microsoft MVP - Consumer Security My Blog: <http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/personal-pc-assistant/> http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/personal-pc-assistant/ Twitter: @Hank_PCDoc Facebook: <https://www.facebook.com/hank.arnold.96> https://www.facebook.com/hank.arnold.96 From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ryan Finnesey Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 10:31 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [NTSysADM] Server Hardware It has been almost 7 years since I selected server hardware. What are peoples preference? I used to be a big HP fan mostly because I used Compaq servers back in the day. I had a lot of clients use Dell mostly because of the price but I found there support poor. How are Lenovo Servers? I am a big ThinkPad fan. I am building a product where I need to deploy a large amount of servers at remote locations. Each server will need to run 4 VMs Microsoft's recommended specs are: o 64-bit dual processor, six core (12 real cores), 2.50 gigahertz (GHz) or higher o 64 gigabytes (GB) ECC RAM o Four 600 GB (or better) 10K RPM 128M Cache SAS 6Gbps disks, configured in a RAID 5 configuration o Three 1 Gbps RJ45 high throughput network adapters Remote monitoring and management will be key. I will most likely be deploying Operations Manager but I need to confirm if I can install software on the Guest OS . Cheers Ryan
