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tenoverFlag for United States of America

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Need help re-configuring a current VMWare environment

Small company. We had about 12 physical servers.  I purchased a Dell R900 with 12 processors and 64GB of RAM and installed ESXi 4 on it.  I have virtuallized 5 of those servers onto this one server at this point.  The problem is, is that I'm using on;y internal disk storage for the datastores, and I'm almost out of space (600GB of HD space, 90GB free).  I would like to also virtualize Exchange and one of our SQL servers in the near future.  What are my options at this point, and what can I do to increase disk space without breaking the bank?  Should I purchase a large (10-12TB) Direct Attached Storage unit, connect it directly to the ESXi host and move the datastore to the DAS?  And what about redundancy?  Again, it's a fine line, because we don't need (or have space) for all these physical servers, however when you start dealing with a SAN, redundancy, etc, it's gets expensive REALLY quick.  I've already purchased vCenter essentials and VEEAM as well.  Thanks for any help or suggestions...
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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I would purchase a 10-12 External DAS Unit, and use this as a new datastore.

As for redundancy, why not purchase another NFS or iSCSI device, which will allow you to replicate your VMs to this device.

Veeam Backup and Replication will allow you to start VMs from the Backup NAS (SureStart), if you require DR.
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IanTh
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