you all are going to get a VM - with Dells acquisition of purchasing EMC (storage) for 67 billion. the days of buying a desktop are long gone.
I'm a Storage Architect. I've worked on EMC vmax, vnx, cx4s, 3s, Extreme IO, 3par (now HP) F series, T series and now 20800 flagship, HP EVAs, Nutanix, Violin Memory systems (all flash), EqualLogic iscsi, etc.
we have over 80 clustered nodes in a ESXi environment hosting over 1000 (server VMs)
we have roughly 50 clustered nodes in another ESXi environment hosting over 300 vdi machines. eventually no one here will have a desktop under their desks anymore.
we spin roughly 10PB of storage with replication local, as well as across the states to our disaster recovery site. We snap, dedup in some arrays, thin provision.
How do we connect all of this? via 2 Brocade 8510 Director class FC switches. that means a whole LOTTA fiber optic runs throughout the datacenter.
