Marc,
Our hosts are older Dell Poweredge 610 with 8 CPUs at 2.6 G and around 100 GB memory. We assign upto 8 CPUs and 22 GB memory to the VM running the software. Centos 7 is very efficient and works well with VMware, we are almost never pushing the hardware.
We update Centos but not frequently, our maintenance window is late Saturday afternoon to early Sunday morning, otherwise we have production going on.
We were concerned about Tintri, but they have been purchased by a company called DDN and received a healthy cash infusion.
We use a company called Veristor (which is headquartered here in Atlanta) who provide a one stop solution. They are VMware partners, and hardware agnostic when it comes to storage and networking. We bought both our former Dell Equalogix and current Tintri solutions from them and they also mapped out and setup the networking for the hosts and storage arrays. Veristor was the low price bidder on our initial purchase of hardware.
Veristor provides a one call support service we use. If there is a problem we call Veristor and they troubleshoot or call in the right support people to get it fixed. I have called them at 2 in the morning to fix an issue and it is nice not having to call two or three vendors who all say the problem is somewhere else.
For disaster recovery with replicate data in real-time from our VMs to Veristor's data center. In a disaster we boot up the VMs at their data center and point our network to them.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Keith McBride
keith.mcbride@halperns.com