Servers
VMware ESXi or Hyper-V? A comparison
Both work. What decides it is licensing, what your backup product supports, and what your team already knows.
A server is a five-to-seven year commitment. Most of the regret we see comes from three or four specification decisions that looked like savings at purchase and became constraints eighteen months later.
Before any part number, answer these:
A specification produced without these answers is a guess with a warranty.
RAM is the component that most often runs out first, and it is the cheapest one to over-specify at purchase.
Two practical points. First, populate the memory channels correctly — a wrongly distributed configuration costs measurable bandwidth for no saving. Second, leave empty slots. Filling every slot with small modules means the only upgrade path is throwing away what you bought.
For a virtualisation host, size for the machines you plan plus roughly 30% headroom, and check the maximum the platform supports before assuming you can expand later.
SSD or spinning disk? For anything a person waits on — databases, application servers, virtual machine storage — SSD. Spinning disks remain reasonable for bulk archive and backup targets where capacity per lira is what matters.
Enterprise or consumer drives? Enterprise drives are specified for continuous operation and for write endurance. Consumer SSDs in a server are a false economy that shows up as a failed drive in year two.
Controller cache and its battery. A RAID controller with write-back cache is substantially faster — but if the cache protection battery or capacitor fails, the controller silently drops to write-through and performance falls off a cliff. This is a genuinely common and genuinely confusing fault. Check the battery is included and that the monitoring covers it.
And the thing that has to be said every time: RAID is not backup. It protects against a disk failing. It does not protect against deletion, corruption, ransomware or the building burning down.
Dual power supplies on anything the business depends on — and plugged into different circuits, otherwise you have two power supplies and one point of failure.
Warranty response time is the specification people ignore. Next-business-day on-site versus a four-hour response is a real cost difference, and it is exactly the difference between an inconvenience and a lost trading day. Decide it against what downtime actually costs you, not against the quotation total.
Also check the warranty duration matches your intended life. A three-year warranty on a machine you plan to run for six means three years of exposure.
Windows Server licensing is by physical core with a minimum count, and virtual machine rights differ substantially between Standard and Datacenter. A host with many virtual machines can make Datacenter cheaper despite the higher headline price. Get this checked before ordering the hardware, because core count affects it.
The same applies to your hypervisor and your backup software, both of which are commonly licensed per socket, per core or per protected machine. These are regularly left off quotations and then arrive as a surprise.
Ask us about server and hardware supply, or request a free assessment directly.
Both work. What decides it is licensing, what your backup product supports, and what your team already knows.
Running past end of support is not a technical preference — it is a compliance position, and usually not a defensible one.
The price gap looks large, but past a certain number of VMs Datacenter comes out cheaper.