Server hardware recommendation/validation for hyper-v

Question

Our small company needs server capable of running several virtualized machines using both linux and windows guest systems. The chosen host OS is Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 (to be upgraded to Hyper-V Server 2016 as soon after RTM is released). At least 4 drives in raid 10 are required, ideally expandable to 8 drives in the future. We have budget of about 5500€.

We've compared some options and currently we are thinking about following configuration from Lenovo:

Server specification:

Processor: Intel® Xeon® E5-2620 v3 (6C, 85W, 2.4GHz)
Hard Drive Bays: 8
Hard Drive Type: 2.5" HS
Hard Drive Included: none
Memory Included: 8GB DDR4-2133MHz (1Rx4) RDIMM
Memory Slots Total / Available: 16 / 15
Pre-Loaded OS: none
RAID Supported: 0,1,10
Power: 750W Platinum
Management: none
Warranty: 1 Year

Included parts:

1x Intel® Xeon® E5-2620 v3 (6C, 85W, 2.4GHz)
1x 8 GB DDR4-2133MHz (1Rx4) RDIMM
1x ThinkServer RAID 500 Adapter (0,1,10)
1x ThinkServer RD350 x16 PCIe Riser 1 Kit
2x 1GbE ports plus dedicated management port
1x 750W Platinum Power Supply
1x Slide Rail Kit
1x Slim DVD-RW

Addons:

1x 4XG0F28846   Lenovo ThinkServer RD350 Intel Xeon E5-2620 v3 (6C, 85W, 2.4GHz) Processor
3x 4X70F28589   Lenovo ThinkServer 8GB DDR4-2133MHz (1Rx4) RDIMM
4x 4XB0G88736   Lenovo ThinkServer Gen 5 2.5" 1.2TB 10K Enterprise SAS 12Gbps Hot Swap Hard Drive

What is your opinion on this configuration? And more importantly, is there anything missing? For instance - this configuration is running two processors - is the 750W power supply enough?

Answer 1

The 750W PS is perfectly fine for your config.

This is just my opinion: I usually go for more smaller drives than less larger drives. If you get 8 600GB drives you will get the same storage capacity (or very close to it, depends on how they are formatted by the FS) but you will get a large speed bonus, which will generally be a good thing if this server is going to run VMs that are I/O intensive.

If this server absolutely needs to be running 24/7 i would also get a secondary PS and run it on a different power circuit. If one goes down than the other one can take over.