@KOOLER said in The SMB Two Server Dilema, What to Do:

@whizzard said in The SMB Two Server Dilema, What to Do:

In scenarios such as these what would be the recommended backup approach: DAS, NAS, Backup Appliance, lower end server, removable disk storage, tapes (intentionally left out cloud)?

Should be separate (physically!) entity non-related to your production cluster. Cheap NAS is OK.

For the average scenario (and I really just mean average) it's Synology or ReadyNAS that I recommend. Easy, supported, cost effective, desktop or rackmount options, well known, good brands, nice features.

@Carnival-Boy said in ESXi Evaluation Period:

I have recently downgraded from ESXi Essentials to ESXi Free simply by entering a different key. It's the same product.

I'd say you moved between products. It's one product family, they are super similar, but are they the same product? Just semantics, but they are very different.

XO Community and XOA are not the same product. But it's the same code.

Great job indeed !!

Veeam support is now from India 😞

@LAH3385 might be good to start a thread and try to determine what your needs are before going down the path of technology. By the time you were asking this question, you were already in pretty deep assuming certain products, product categories and platform HA. We should start with a business needs analysis, use that to set goals and then use the goals to select technology approaches.

@scottalanmiller said:

@IT-ADMIN said:

really the way you write is very eloquent

Thank you. 🙂

you are welcome

@thecreativeone91 said:

XenServer supports SD Card installs. Not sure about Xen

XS is just a packaging of Xen. So anything XS supports, Xen has to have supported. Xen is completely flexible and can be used anyway that you want, it itself doesn't have the same concept of "supported" like XS does.

IOPS are the biggest concern really. But without anything like a database which really needs them, RAID 6 might be more than enough. Exchange wouldn't be a big concern as it is not IOPS heavy. RAID 10 is far better tuned for heavy writes, but if reads are the vast majority, RAID 6 will keep right up.