We've been running a Nutanix cluster for about 7 years, we've pushed off replacing it with some mid-life memory upgrades but now we're feeling the age with the CPU, memory, and spinning drives so we're finally looking to upgrade.

We're looking to move away from Nutanix since the licensing seems to double at every renewal, and with the hardware we're looking at (All SSD, doubled storage/cores compared to the current cluster), we've been quoted licensing that costs 3 times as much as the hardware, and who knows what it will be in 3 years. We're not using a lot of the fancy features, but do like that it's at least one cohesive package.

The Nutanix environment is a 3 node cluster with an identical 3 nodes in a disaster recovery site in another city, which we replicate the primary cluster to using the built-in data protection feature. We also run free Proxmox on a couple smaller, simple clusters (Using built-in VM replication between nodes with local storage) and I quite like it, but of course one of the many differences between Proxmox and Nutanix is that Nutanix has all the fancy storage backend that handles replicating storage between nodes, dedupe, and replication to the DR site.

For us to consider Proxmox as a replacement for our primary clusters, I've been searching for a replacement for the storage component of Nutanix that will somewhat mirror our current setup, and so far I've found Starwind VSAN and tried out the free version on a few spare old machines, and it seems to do alright, but lacks the replication between clusters.

Is there another storage solution that would work for this? Should I look at VM-level replication with another tool like Veeam? SANs have been a blindspot for me since I've always assumed they're for huge orgs, but do standalone SANs make sense for relatively smaller environments (Under 10TB of disk utilized, about 60 VMs)?