Looking to estimate VM performance & alternatives - potential new purchase...

[drdope]

2. Are there any alternative configurations arrangements I should consider ?

Hi, I'm running a relatively well equipped /upgraded TS-677 (it's in the signature) as a small business server with 8 VMs (6 Clients; 2 Servers) in an office eviroment.
I'm currently looking at alternatives too, as QNAP chose to discontinue Ryzen Desktop NAS.
Our current setup is first and foremost constrained by the amount of RAM, than by the amount of fast PCIe storage and lastly by CPU-Power/amount of Cores.

We bought the TS-677 roughly 3 year ago, as it was much cheaper than buying or buildung a server for VMWare ESXi with vSphere and Veaam Backup for vSphere,
which in license fees alone would have cost more than a naked TS-677 over time.

If our TS-677 dies tomorrow, i would restore it on a spare TS-877 (which is privately used right now as storage & plex server).
As an replacement i currently look into the following Open-Source NAS-OS:
--> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XigmaNAS
--> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeNAS
(iirc correct it's called TrueNAS now)
running on relatively cheap to come by Desktop/Workstation Hardware like this:

Bildschirmfoto 2020-09-19 um 21.23.53.png

12/24Core Ryzen 3000/Zen2; 128GB and room for adding 5x PCIe 4.0 4x/NVMe SSD & 6x Sata-HDD Drives, for about 1500€.
I personally don't care for Hot-Swapping drives/PSUs (it' imho a more of a convenience feature, than a necessity in small business environments).
Qnap is charging 2,5 times the price, for a less powerful systems in EU actually:
--> https://skinflint.co.uk/qnap-quts-hero- ... 95366.html

[jimerb]

I went and purchased a NUC10 with 64GB of memory and a 1TB SSD.

I coudn't get the Hyper-V network adapter to work (Common problem) but after some tinkering i got VMWARE EXSi 7 (Free version) on it and loaded up a bunch of VM's.

It FLIES! So fast. By thin provisioning the VM storage I have tons of room for VM's. I feel like i have a 20k server.

The only problem is that I can't backup the VM's with the free version of VMWare Exsi -- even with QNAP's Hyper Data Protector. It only works on the paid version.

Does anyone know a good way to backup the VM's with VMWARE ESXi free version?

[Missing_Link]

@drdope -
I saw QNAP released a whole bunch of new NAS's not so long after my original post. Did you go with the FreeNAS OS in the end, or did you buy one of the new offerings from QNAP ?. Thanks for your info btw - it was really helpful to get another pro user perspective.

@jimrb -
Did you consider VitrualBox on the NUC10 ? - I'd used that with great success on my old Win 7 laptop for years prior to buying my NAS. Backups and snapshots did not seem to be a problem with VB. Cheers for the idea as well.