I’ve gotten tired of the technical issues in my vSphere 5.5 lab as I study for the CCIE Data Center. Recently, I ordered a Mac Pro (3.5GHz 6-core with 12MB of L3 cache, 64GB (4x16GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC, 1TB PCIe-based flash storage and Dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs with 3GB of GDDR5 VRAM each. This new Mac Pro will handle all of my complete vSphere 6.0 lab needs and should scale very nicely. I also ordered a AKiTiO Thunder2 Quad Mini (Thunderbolt 2) with 4 Mushkin Enhanced Reactor MKNSSDRE1TB 2.5" 1TB SATA III Internal Solid State Drives. At a minimum, my VMFS Datastores within this configuration will average around 1300 MB/Sec Reads, 1200 MB/Sec Writes and 150,000 IOPS (4 KB Reads/Writes). The entire cost for this solution was a bit pricy but it should rival most large scale solutions on a smaller scale. Performance benchmarking results write-up coming soon next month.

Mac Pro - $5,999.00
https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

-3.5GHz 6-core with 12MB of L3 cache (Xeon E5 Processor)
-64GB (4x16GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
-1TB PCIe-based flash storage
-Dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs with 3GB of GDDR5 VRAM each

AKiTiO Thunder2 Quad Mini - $349.99 (Direct Purchase from AKiTiO)
http://www.akitio.com/portable-storage/akitio-thunder2-quad-mini

-Thunderbolt 2 Interface: 20 Gb/sec
-Read Speed: 1375 MB/Sec
-Write Speed: 1232 MB/Sec
-Drives: Four 2.5” drives with SATA 6Gb/s interface slots

Mushkin Enhanced Reactor MKNSSDRE1TB 2.5" 1TB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - $349.99 x 4 = $1,399.96
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226596

-Max Sequential Read: 560MB/s
-Max Sequential Write: 460MB/s
-4KB Random Read: Up to 74,000 IOPS
-4KB Random Write: Up to 76,000 IOPS
-Seek Time: <0.1ms
-MTBF: 1,500,000 hours