New Year...New Server

So my old Z620 is getting a bit long in the tooth and I've noticed that some of the more intense jobs I have running are taking a very long time to execute, so I have decided to do a bit of an upgrade cycle. As my lab is based on VMware with no workloads that require high throughput, it's more important to have core count than CPU. So after extensive review and googling, I have decided on the following:

Dell T440 Server with 2.5" drive bay (16 drives)
Intel Xeon 6148 Gold 20-core / 40-thread CPU @ 2.4Ghz
256GB DDR4 ECC RAM
8x 1TB SSD on H730P Raid controller in RAID10 for I/O speed
1 x 1.8TB SAS HDD for ISO and Images storage
1 x 2TB NVMe SSD for ultra fast storage
1 x Dell BOSS (for ESXi boot) 240GB in RAID1
750W redundant PSU

All I need to do is install ESXi, recreate a temp windows server install with Veeam VBR12 on it, import my existing backups and then restore all my Vm's with changed datastores....then hey presto, everything is back.

The only thing I might do is re-install Openshift from scratch as the root partition on my single node setup is a bit too small and it's probably easier to start from scratch than try and figure out how to expand it. I can then just re-import all the apps from the Kasten backups in a matter of hours.

As simple as that I will have a vastly more powerful lab I can do some really funky stuff with and still have plenty of room for expansion should I need it.

If anyone needs a good 2nd hand server setup I can highly recommend www.bargainhardware.co.uk