My company is stretching the limits of our HDD, RAM and CPU resources with our development VMs in our current 2 HyperVM farms. We're running some out-dated (like 4-5 years old) Dell Tower servers with like 96 GB of RAM and 2 Xeon procs each and a total of about 3 TB of space between them (not evenly). We're a Microsoft Stack Web development firm that also handles some Mobile App stuff, usually just complimentary to a Responsive Website built with ASP.NET, Angular, etc.

 

We'd like to build up our full-height server rack (standard Dell server rack) with rack-mounted servers and/or drive assemblies to support a whole new development architecture so we can retire/re-purpose the existing hardware.

 

The new environment should have 4 development VMs (aka- Dev Servers) run from a host Windows 2012 R2 server with HyperVM installed (or a reliable alternative that provides all the nightly backup and other features from HyperVM). Each Dev Server should have the following resources available to it:

 

• 12 cores (can be 6 physical, 6 hyper-threaded)
  
• 1 TB of disk space
  
• 32 GB of RAM
  
• Windows Server 2012 R2 installed
  

 

There are also a jumble of other servers that will need much less in terms of resources, such as only 1-2 cores, 256 MB of disk space and 4-8 GB of RAM. These servers could actually propagate the old hardware after we've moved the main Dev Servers off to the new hardware.

 

Requirements:

 

• 1 primary unRAID controller/control-box (if possible)
  
• Must be able to host multiple VMs
  
• The 4 Dev Servers must be accessible on SSDs for I/O performance. All other servers could run from normal HDDs as they are not performance dependent
  
• Rack-mounted to take advantage of our Dell Rack
  

Is there a question in there somewhere?

I did ramble on a bit didn't I? Sorry about that.

 

We're looking for hardware recommendations and a little confirmation on if what we want to do with it is is even possible with unraid.