Which 2U Rack case / New Homelab setup

[MyArk]

Hi Guys,

 

I'm after some advice on 2U rack cases that can hold up to 12 3.5" drives (must be SATA backplanes and hot swappable to a certain extent - I know SATA is not but would like the ability to pull drives when needed without opening the chassis)

 

So here is the down low, I have an older NAS which is also a VMWare ESXi server running many VMs.  Whilst the VM part is no longer important with moving to a much bigger rack setup, I wanted to reuse that for extra storage for CCTV.

 

Old setup;

 

Silverstone Mini-ITX DS380 case

5x 2.5" (with 2.5 to 3.5 convertors) (4Tb each) Crucial MX500 (Data)

1 x 2.5" 500Gb Crucial MX500 (VMWare ESXi 8 OS only)

Asrock Rack C2550D4I Motherboard / Intel Atom CPU combo - https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=C2550D4I#Specifications

64Gb Crucial DDR3 RAM

 

New setup;

2 Dell Poweredge R730XD servers (2x Xeon E5-2670v3 CPUs - 12 cores each, 512Gb DDR4 RAM each) - each with ESXi running on Raid 1 iirc (Mirroring) using 2 separate 256Gb 2.5" drives

1 Dell Equalogic SAN

96Tb raw of SAS drives in RAID 5

 

So as you can tell no rush to transfer the old setup across But it would be nice to reuse that machine as it still works perfectly fine and would be a good fit for CCTV NVR style storage but I would prefer to transfer it in to the rack instead of the Mini-ITX case

 

I am also in the process of rebuilding my home lab, any suggestions on if to continue with ESXi as I have done for many years, or would XCP-NG/Proxmox/Xencenter be a better option?

 

Any suggestions?

 

Love the channel, been catching up on bent CPU pins just tonight, unfortunately damaged an LGA2011-v3 socket earlier on that needs repairing, so will be attempting that tomorrow.

 

Many Thanks

 

M