And since you have already paid for Essentials Plus, I can see how something like Starwind makes sense to pool your storage together. And I like the idea of single CPU. Even though your vSphere license covers up to 2 CPU in each host, you can certainly add a physical CPU later and only if needed to save a little cost on the front side.

I saw VxRail mentioned, and I saw Starwind mentioned. But there is another option here. You could go single CPU and license vSAN for either two or 3 hosts. A two host configuration does require a witness (basically a VM that must run outside the cluster, even if on a free ESXi host), where a 3-node cluster would not. With vSAN Standard, you can do a hybrid vSAN and use disk groups made up of one caching drive (SSD) and multiple capacity drives. With a 3-node cluster, there would be a copy of each VMDK on two hosts in the cluster and a witness component on the 3rd host, allowing one host to be put in maintenance node or even to completely fail without losing data.

https://cormachogan.com/2017/03/27/debunking-behavior-myths-3-node-vsan-cluster

Remember, as you are looking to do this, let your decision fall on something that will give you more capacity, better performance, and easy of management for future upgrades so you can stop focusing quite so much on keeping the lights on and use more time to innovate on other projects. Regardless of what you go with, I would plan this project so that you leave open drive bays in the hosts you are getting so you can scale up the storage in the future if you have the need.

Even though it's a small workload, I would still look at storage performance requirements closely before you make a purchase so you get the correct speed of drives. How is the OBR10 with 7200 RPM drives performing today? Would looking at 10K RPM drives improve performance and make a true business impact with your applications?

We often discuss how career may affect our family or family life, but have you ever thought about how family influence affects career?

Think about the influence your parents had / have on your life. What lessons, if any, did you learn from watching the way your parents approached career? How did those observations affect the way you approach career today? There’s a lesson here for all of us. Observing others, especially those with whom we spend the most time, exposes us to qualities we wish we possessed and those we hope we will never possess. But those observations also have great potential to shape the choices we make.

Not everyone is fortunate to have good parents. Not everyone has more than one parent or even a decent parental figure. I was very fortunate to have two dads – my biological father and my adoptive father. After just completing a cross-country road trip to attend my adoptive father’s memorial due to his recent passing, I’d like to share some of the lessons he taught me that apply to career as a tribute.

You can read the rest of the story here.

On this Podcast Tuesday, have you thought about what factors might cause bombing an interview? And how should you dress for an interview? We provide some answers to these questions this week. Get the full episode here.

This week we tackle LinkedIn etiquette (as recommended to MBA students) and why raising your impact radius / investing thought leadership is important. Get the full episode here.

I like the host reboot idea as well. But I also wonder if maybe at some point after the last upgrade some of the VMs were upgraded to the latest VMware Tools but others were not. Maybe use this KB to check some VMs that show no stats and some that show stats correctly to confirm the version is what it should be - https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1003947. I thought the back end data from the screenshot above was populated by data from the hypervisor only and not from VMware Tools, but we shall see.

@phlipelder said in Looking for firmware:

Need the service tag to pick up the right driver and firmware.

We've seen some really nasty bugs patched by some of the latest SAS HBA firmware out of Dell (they cook their own).

We deploy converged solution sets on their stuff (2+ nodes + JBOD(s)).

And since you're having trouble installing the firmware versions you mentioned, I would contact Dell support as well.

Hey @scottalanmiller, should we expect to see you at this one? It's been a while.

It's the first day back after a long weekend, so what do you do? Take comfort in the fact that episode 7 of Nerd Journey is here to get you through the week.

http://nerd-journey.com/nerd-journey-007-professional-networking-and-training-revisited/

I'm a little late on the post, but this week we discuss the ins and outs of training - why you need it, how to train, when to train, etc. You can catch the full episode here - https://t.co/YtihQXa2nS.