Current Setup:
*ESXi Host1: Dell PE R710 (16 core, 96GB mem) (Production1)
*ESXi Host2: Dell PE 2950 III (8 core, 64GB mem) (Production2)
*ESXi Host3: Dell PE 2950 (8 core, 32GB mem) (Dev)
*HP StoreVirtual P4300, x6 (Shared by Production servers)
*Veeam + vCenter: Dell PE2950 (8 core, 16GB mem) (Physical server)
***eSATA RAID enclosure for local Backup Jobs
***NAS for local Backup Copy Jobs
***Backup jobs use Direct SAN Access with Storage Snapshots enabled
New Setup:
*ESXi Host1: Dell PE R720 (40 core, 128GB mem) (Production1)
*ESXi Host2: Dell PE R720 (40 core, 128GB mem) (Production2)
*Same HP SAN
*Consolidate Dev server???
*Dell PE R710 as new Veeam B&R server...either physical or virtual
***Internal RAID for faster local Backup Jobs
***MD1200 w/ 12 4TB HDDs for local Backup Copy Jobs
(CPU core count is including both physical and virtual cores.)
As you can see, the R710 is slated to replace the current Veeam B&R server in one way or another. Given the significant increase in CPU performance and memory capacity, I'm wondering if I should consolidate my old dev host onto it as well while breaking out vCenter and Veeam B&R into separate VMs. I have no doubt it could handle all that for me, but I don't want to end up regressing in Veeam on the data access side of the equation while I'm stepping up my performance on the storage side.
This has caused some lingering questions:
A. Should I keep Veeam physical...or transition it to virtual?
B. Or I suppose I could keep the server with 32GB mem and reconfigure it as a physical proxy for the SAN?
C. Can Storage Snapshots be used with HotAdd?
D. Due to the way HP VirtualStore handles iSCSI, I can't use HP's MPIO in Windows for Veeam since it can cause locks on the LUNs in vSphere. Because of that, my Direct SAN Access is limited to a single 1Gbit NIC on my current physical setup. On the other hand - and correct me if I'm wrong - if I were to virtualize Veeam, give its VM a 10Gbit virtual NIC for the SAN network, use the existing MPIO iSCSI setup on the vSphere side for the 4 Gbit NICs connected to the SAN, could I see higher throughput???
P.S. I've already planned to move Veeam to a new install of Server 2012 R2 either way to take advantage of the dedupe features for my Backup Copy Jobs.
P.P.S. There are also additional Backup Copy Jobs and Replication Jobs for off-site protection, but I figured I'd vomited up enough stuff already

All thoughts are welcome! Thanks!