VMWare Hardware Specs + Connecting DL380 Gen 11 together questions + MSA SAS

[WM99]

Looking to build a VMWARE HPE Build. I have a basic template and very new to this. We have our own VMWARE cluster but its out of resources. We want to build a simple vmware cluster thats easy

Setting up a small amount of VM's ~5. From applications to SQL Database

1st VM: 4 CPU, 32GB, 1TB

2nd VM: 4 CPU, 32GB, 2TB

3rd VM: Asked that Physical cores should be considered in the design. Requires 24cores 64gb of ram 1TB

4th VM: 8 CPU's 32GB 2TB

5th VM: 8 CPU 32GB 1TB

My server spec should have enough to support this many hosts with N+1. Will be getting 3x HP DL380 Gen 11

Looking to setup 10gig. The confusing part is how do I direct connect all the servers together for VMWARE. 

3x HPE DL380 Gen 11

• 2x INTEL XEON-SILVER 4514Y 16cores
• 256GB of Ram 8x32
• 1x Broadcom BCM57412 Ethernet 10Gb 2-port SFP+ OCP3 Adapter for HPE
• 1x Broadcom BCM5719 Ethernet 1Gb 4-port BASE-T OCP3 Adapter for HPE
• 1x 480GB Read intensive SSD
• 1x HPE NS204i-u Gen11 NVMe Hot Plug Boot Optimized Storage Device Raid 1 480x480
• 2x 1000w psu
• 1x HPE Smart Array E208e-p SR Gen10 (8 External Lanes/No Cache) 12G SAS PCIe Plug-in Controller

1x HPE MSA 2062 12Gb SAS SFF Storage

• 22x HPE MSA 1.92TB SAS 12G Read Intensive SFF (2.5in) M2 3yr Wty SSD

Connections

1x Cisco 9500 16 port 10GB SFP switch - 3 ports taken 1x each server.
1x Cisco 9300 24 Port 1GB Switch - 12 ports taken 4x each server for redundancy. + 4 for ilo = 16

HPE MSA SAS

3x SAS Connector from MSA to each server.

I guess my question is direct connecting the 3 servers together? I assume doing it over the 10GB switch would be a bad idea?

[shiva_jr]

Hi @WM99 , 

     Yes, you can make the connectivity in such a way that all the servers should be connected to the same network fabric (if the setup is small, you can connect to same switch).   ALl the Esxi, Vcenter and other VMs should be in same subnet.
      Since, only 3 servers will be used here, you can use the 10gig switch also. (Please mind about scalability of the setup if you want to add more resouce in future).

Regards,
Shiva_JR

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