My 24/7 homelab is currently running in a 3 node all flash VSAN: 3x Dell R630 2x Xeon E5 2650 v4 10 core 384gb ddr4 (16gb X 24) 1x 960gb intel DC nvme ssd 5x Samsung 2.5” SATA 1.92tb enterprise SSD

I just got two 2u supermicro x11 based systems with 12x 3.5” bays each that I’m planning to migrate all of my drives into from the VSAN and add a couple more. Each 2u contains 2x Xeon gold 5120 14 core, 384gb ddr4 (16gb x24)

Since I’m planning on using using strictly these 2 nodes to be my 24/7 cluster, I’ll need some shared storage. Some options may be: 2 node all flash VSAN (hosting the witness on one node, I know it’s not supported but it works) I do have a license for this Starwind VSAN (though I think I pass the community edition maximums) Host truenas scale on each with the raid controller passed through and replicate and host a shared ISCSI / nfs share (havnt done this yet and leaning towards it, anyone tried this yet?) Similar setup to scale, but windows storage spaces direct all flash Nutanix 2 node robo (might not have a license for it)

Anything else anyone can think of that might work well? Esxi is a hard requirement for the hypervisor.

Alternatively I do have an r730 with 24 2.5” bays, a single 12 core e5 2660 v4 12 core and 192gb ram that I could stick all the SSDs into and make a large dedicated truenas bare metal box, but I’d like to only power 2 servers 24/7 if possible as 768gb ram will do for my daily operations, I’ve got other clusters for spinning up and down depending on what I’m doing.

I’ve only got 10g Nic’s but I do have some space 40g ports on my switch, so 10g is the speed requirement, shouldn’t be hard at all, and even if I upgraded to 40g that should be a piece of cake as well.

TLDR best 2 node solution with shared storage running on ESXi? VSAN? Truenas on each ESXi host? S2D?