Hello, I need your help. I want to create a 2-node ONTAP Select 9.6RC1 (90-day Evaluation License) HA cluster on ESXi 6.7 for my test environment. This target will be used from the bare-metal Windows Server 2016. As bare-metal hosts, I use 2 Dell PowerEdge R730 servers:
- 2xCPU - Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2683 v3 @ 2.00GHz;
- 128GB RAM;
- 1x 1TB HDD (for boot) ;
- 1x Intel NMVe DC P3700 (PCIe 2TB);
- 2x Mellanox Connectx-4 Lx 40GbE.
I have a bunch of questions.
1. Can I create the target on NVMe drives? Could you provide the manual on how that can be done? If there’s no way to use PCIe SSDs, where can I find any recommendations on the hardware that can be used to create a target?
2. What’s the lowest possible number of SATA or PCIe SSDs is needed in each server to ensure the highest possible target performance (I'm also curious about their minimal capacity)?
