How to assemble "SHD" for a home server and tests?

Question

Virtualization

Good day to all!
There are 2 test servers on intel i7 home hardware. They run virtual machines under ESXI. There is a desire to learn and assemble a collective farm storage system (on a regular home hardware) so that virtual machines are stored and work on it. But there is no understanding of how best to do it. provide a fast channel between storage and esxi host (yes, I understand that without duplicating storage). While there are thoughts to buy 3 network cards 10gb ( fс , InfiniBand ) . Insert two ports into storage, put sata + ssd disks there for cache, install freenas or the like, or maybe vmware vsan, StarWind vSAN Free.

The question is how to test all this as cheaply as possible? there is a wide variety on ebay and there is no clear understanding of what to buy to make it work exactly.

Answer 1

On 2 hosts, you can build a VSAN with a whitness VM. The only thing you need to understand is that the way out is one of them = problems. For vSAN, for good, you need at least 3 hosts.
And so - take any piece of iron, put FreeNas, NasFree, Xpenology there and give it to ESXi via iSCSI or NFS.
In NAS 2-port 10/25-ku, in servers single-port.
There are many articles on Habré about home NAS.
For good, you need to understand what kind of performance you expect to get from the NAS and from this already select the configuration.