I had to trim the number of VMs I ran on the MS-01 to, I think, 9. I usually run at least twice that many on the R740. Admittedly, one MS-01 ran what I needed, but some projects, like bringing up a virtualized Nutanix cluster, had to wait until the R740 was back. The R740 uses about 185 watts running whatever load of VMs. I think the two MS-01s drew more. The MS-01s using 4 10G Base-T transceivers between them put out a lot of heat too. The R740 has a cool-running 25G fibre connection and only 1 10G Ethernet connection for redundancy. I was able to experiment with memory tiering under ESXi on the second MS-01 though, so that was a positive. It seemed to work but at this time, I am not using it anywhere.

Do you still want to run an enterprise server? You can get a beautiful R730xd with room for something like 14 3.5" drives for around $435 on eBay. Beautiful machine. R740 (Skylake) are a few hundred more. R740 Cascade Lake, are a bit more rare still. Anything smaller than a dual processor machine and you're likely going to need more than one of them running clustered, to support the same workload.

Might pursue VMware Cloud Foundation 9. Maybe.

I am mildly curious about the whole thing, but I am really curious about vCenter and ESX. It's likely we won't run much more than that, plus some Aria stuff, at work. To even play with the full product, I'm going to have to wait until William Lam boils it down to a scriptable install on a single host. I am not going to touch my "production" hardware for 9.0-anything, so I'll need to find something else for vCenter 9 and ESX 9.

We're not giving up VMware any time soon, but we are looking for ways to reduce our multi-million-dollar footprint. Toward that end, about 45 of us had a 2-hour AWS "class" this morning, that will continue tomorrow and Wednesday mornings. There's another three days of class next week for another group of similar size.

@Brandon Lee Ha! Wait till they get the bill from Amazon. We did a pilot a couple of years ago, deploying a VMware SDDC to Amazon. With a test server and some temporary infrastructure, we burned through a few tens of thousands of dollars. I am not sure why we're even considering doing any small thing full-time at AWS. We have two well stocked data centers with some of the latest equipment. I know that VDI, which is what I do, isn't going anywhere. It'll be in-house for years. Horizon is one of the few distribution methods supported by our vendor of EMR software. Horizon will be supporting Nutanix as the back-end shortly, but if you've ever worked with Nutanix in a data center, it can be a solution that rivals or exceeds the cost of VMware.

I think Starwinds VSAN, free, allows for a few as two dissimilar hosts to participate in a cluster. VMware's vSAN requires two hosts (with a witness), but there are strict configuration requirements on HDD, SDD, etc., and it's RAM-hungry as well. Also, difficult to license vCenter (required) and vSAN outside the enterprise. Nutanix, which is always deployed as an HCI solution (with one new exception recently announced) may also allow dissimilar hosts in a cluster. A Nutanix Community Edition cluster, free, can have 1, 3 or 4 hosts, but not 2. Register with Nutanix using a company email address and follow-up in r/nutanix on Reddit if necessary. There are other virtual SAN solutions out there, but none others come to mind just now. Whatever you do, it would be an interesting proof-of-concept, but trusting it as primary storage for VMs or data... nah ah.