Yes that’s sounds like a plan. My xeons finally there, I’ll be setting it in a couple days as well, when Amazon ships the thermal paste that is. Those Xeon Scalable certainly use a lot of that…
No idea if ha works with a quorum system, but it nevertheless works should work with 2 systems pretty well. If the VM doesn’t come up, you can always just easily start it via ssh with hosted-engine --start if I’m not mistaken