I’ve got four HPs clustered for VMware vSAN and three more little systems – 2 HPs and a Dell – clustered as a VMware “remote site” to my PowerEdge primary site.

After you install ESXi to the 256GB SSD, there may or may not be any space left over for the Installer to create a datastore. In other words, the SSD is small enough that ESXi may take the whole thing for itself, and not give you any usable space for VMs.

You’ll have to install and see.

I have the four-port version of this hub in a box o’switches, somewhere in a closet.