Best posts made by taurex

From my experience, most docking stations work seamlessly plug and play, even cheaper ones. There used to be a need for a manual DisplayLink driver update for Win 10 but not anymore.

Are you sure, you were actually getting 1.6 GB/s, not 1.6 Gbit/sec with iPerf or similar? 1.6 GB/s is more than the theoretical maximum bandwidth of a 10 Gbit link unless it's a sum of results for each of two vNICs or something. Copypasting the file across remote desktops won't give you an accurate figure, btw. With coping large files over 10 Gbit links or above you'd need Jumbo Frames enabled on all devices along the path. Otherwise, you won't be able to fully utilise the available bandwidth. Your storage config should not be a bottleneck. On the other hand, file copy is not a real measuring tool for VM storage performance. You should be using something like diskSPD or IOmeter to get more accurate results inside VMs for typical virtual workloads (random in nature). Storage latency and IOPS are more accurate metrics for them IMO.

@openit Not sure whether the same way would work with QNAP RAID but Synology has a KB on it: https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Storage/How_can_I_recover_data_from_my_DiskStation_using_a_PC

Citing @StorageNinja: "...Do not use CrystalDiskMark for testing a hypervisor or server workload. It was designed for sanity tests on desktop systems. Virtual environments involve multiple disks on different controllers, on different VMs and parallel IO can either yield higher results or far worse (IO blender effect). Test something realistic with what you are running.
VMware HCIbench isn't bad for spinning up a bunch of workers and running different profiles or DiskSPD and Intel IOmeter. If you are going to run SQL, HammerDB might be worth running (or SLOB if you will be running Oracle). Given people using CrystalDiskMark and stuff tend to either test unrealistically small or large working sets (and therefore test Cache, or what the storage layer looks like with a full file system)..."

Are you positive no logical volume is configured on that host in its RAID controller? You should be able to check it via iLO. Or you can start Provmox VE installer in debug mode that gives you a console. You can use it to list all recognised drives.

Do they have a vCenter running that controls that host? You can run some useful charts there that tells you how it was utilised over a certain time. I have one of VMs set up as per its vendor's requirements with 24 GB of RAM and I can't touch it otherwise they won't support it. This is how much this production VM has used its allocated memory over a year:)

I wouldn't even waste an entire host for an RDS farm, let alone a single VM tbh. I agree with Jared, try to get something modern on a warranty with a better CPU (AMD EPYC are worth taking a look at), more RAM and SSDs instead. Unfortunately, the newer 14th Gen Dell refurbs are hard to come by in the land of Oz but the 10 gen HPE Proliant refurbs can be found at many HPE Renew partners, often half-price from new with full NBD warranties. Also, check out Digicor for their SuperMicro deals.

Scott pretty much nailed it. Although collecting and preserving logs centrally is a good idea, analysing them anything but superficially would normally require a dedicated IT security team. There are (expensive) solutions like SIEM that make this job easier but even those can hardly be managed by a typical SMB/SME IT depts on their own. If the OP's organisation needs to be ISO 27001 certified or compliant with PCI, HIPAA etc. yet small enough, looking at MDR, MSSP or managed SIEM providers might be an alternative.