vrod

In regards to going 12Gbps, just make sure that you actually do get SAS 12Gbps SSDs.... It doesn't make too much sense spending the money on a 12Gbps backplane and controller if you will be using 6Gbps end-devices. Intels DataCenter SSDs are among the most robust and popular, but afaik, they only make SATA-based SSD's, not SAS. So that would mean that these would run on 6Gbps. And we all know that HDDs can't reach anything near of even 3Gbps speeds...
 
If you go the HDD route, make sure to get a controller with a decent battery-backed flash-cache. Otherwise your 4K IOps will be pretty bad... If you go for SSD's, then yea go for 12Gbps if you go the SAS-way, or go for a 6Gbps if you go the SATA-way. Nevertheless, PCIe controllers are soon around the corner with NVMe backplanes, so SATA/SAS will probably be phased out "soon".
 
And yes, use RAID6 or RAID10, however just know that you aren't protected from bitrot-issues (these are rare but they occur and can corrupt your entire RAID), like with ZFS or btrfs (since they use CoW and are self-healing). You also have no compression, deduplication or datastore replication options when running the disks locally. What is popular today is to run a VM appliance who hosts the storage on something like ZFS or btrfs, this is what most hyperconverged solutions do today. Proxmox (other hypervisor vendor) supports this kind of distributed storage through ceph (it also supports zfs root), but since you are using VMware and just one host, this probably doesn't apply to you.

pfSense would be able to do what you need. Both load-balancing and failover as such.

WSUS is a bit of work for such small network. It would probably be easier to just get a http proxy like squid which could cache the contents.

Since you have Active Directory, I would recommend Kerio (if money is a problem), or Exchange Online through Office365.
 
it doesn’t really matter though what you use, many employees are stupid enough to put a label with their password on the pc somewhere.
 
I would strongly suggest, whatever you choose, to implement 2FA.

WSUS is a bit of work for such small network. It would probably be easier to just get a http proxy like squid which could cache the contents.

I guess that makes sense in some way. Only info we need here in germany is the tax number which you can't really do much with.

Yes you can, it might obviously be a bit slower than usually

Felt the same back then but decided to go ahead and already try to figure out what I wanted for a professional career. Many people doesn't know what to do after the general school/education so I guess you could spend some time ln that and get ahead of it. Then once your current education is done, you can jump right onto the next.
 
with that said, thank god i'm done with school  

Felt the same back then but decided to go ahead and already try to figure out what I wanted for a professional career. Many people doesn't know what to do after the general school/education so I guess you could spend some time ln that and get ahead of it. Then once your current education is done, you can jump right onto the next.
 
with that said, thank god i'm done with school  

If it's possible. Take a backup of your games and other files to a 3rd drive. Then install windows on the ssd, copy things onto it and completely zero the old hdd. This will help greatly to prevent quick fragmentation and it will run faster with just zero's on the platters. Then format the HDD and copy your files back onto it.

Dedicating to PhysX isn't even worth it. 

You should also make sure that you have enough storage space to hold all the survelliance. If you haven't been told a retention time for the data, it would be good to figure it out.