Awesome. I really need to join the NYC VMUG. Have not had a chance to get around to that yet.
Yes, you really do need to join VMUG. The content even at just regular meetups is often very valuable. Sometimes they talk about technologies that would not apply to SMBs, but it really is interesting to learn about them. Overall, I find the content very good if you have a good VMUG leadership group.
Maybe I could use the HP DL 385 G5 I have with the MSA 70 and run something like FreeNAS on it for another datastore option?
That's one option. Something that would be good for, to be honest, would be your StorageCraft server, if you go with that.
I was thinking use it as a NFS datastore and a place to store the VM files for my current physical machines like was mentioned above. That saves money on a secondary backup solution.
Actually, that would be a tertiary backup solution, as you have Veeam and BE already. The original decision seemed to be "buy hardware or buy another backup solution". It seems that utilizing current hardware like that could avoid both?
I'd get rid of BackupExec with the P2V of the physical boxes and be able to use Veeam. That eliminates cost of software. But, I cannot avoid some investment in increasing backup storage. So this does not completely eliminate a need for more hardware but does decrease the cost of the hardware needed by a large factor.
The only real reason I would see for not going with thin provisions would be poor planning and then running out of space. otherwise I don't see a issue or reason not to go with it if it's planned well.
That is a surprisingly common fear that I have heard.
I've never used it. I think the max servers I've had is 10 hosts. but some of those were free version and some the paid version so it's never really been feasible for me.
IOPS are the biggest concern really. But without anything like a database which really needs them, RAID 6 might be more than enough. Exchange wouldn't be a big concern as it is not IOPS heavy. RAID 10 is far better tuned for heavy writes, but if reads are the vast majority, RAID 6 will keep right up.