VM /ETC

The VMworld 2009 Hands on Labs (HOL) VI was not the only VMware Global Engineering Technical Operations Team (GETO) managed infrastructure at the Moscone Center in 2009. The VMware Cloud Pavilion Booth and it’s demos, some customer demos, and even the VMTN Lounge and vExpert booth (I used personally) was run from a self contained, mobile rack. That rack was/is powered by MDS Quadv Servers and Xsigo I/O Virtualization Solutions.

MDS and Xsigo were sponsors of the GestaltIT Tech Field Day, and their presentations were first on our Day 1 agenda. Although I knew VMware (big thanks are due to John Troyer for setting everything up!) would be hosting these sessions at their head quarters in Palo Alto, I did not make the connection between the companies until I arrived on site Thursday. The aforementioned VMworld 2009 mobile rack is currently running in the VMware Briefing Center and is patiently waiting to be shipped again by the GETO team to the next conference or event.

Here are some of my notes about the capabilities of the rack. I may have misunderstood some of the wiring details.

What is in the rack?

• 2 Extreme 10GE switchs connected to the Xsigo I/O Director
• 5 MDS Quad V Servers (2U each Quad) – 4 Blades per Quad for a total of 20 servers. Each server has 48GB RAM and quad core Nehalem CPUs. Each server is connected to the Xsigo I/O Director via 20GB adapters
• EMC Celera NAS storage/CX4 120 connected via 10 GE iSCSI to the Xsigo I/O Director

Xsigo and MDS enabled a consolidated infrastructure that boasts some staggering possibilities

• Powered VMware 53 demos
• Consolidated 14 racks in 2008 to this single rack in 2009
• Can run up to 1,000 VMs
• 2 weeks before VMworld 2009 the rack design was changed from Fiber Channel to iSCSI without changing any hardware. Only new virtual ports needed to be configured. Without Xsigo many NICs would have been required (for 20 servers).
• Minimal cabling required for 2 Xsigo I/O Directors in a HA configuration

GETO designs on napkins too

It was great to see Randy Keener, Group Manager of GETO, and other members of his team at the presentations. Randy’s group was there to help show off their infrastructure and explain how GETO conceived the mobile rack design on a steak house table mat one night during dinner. Here’s a photo of the original table mat drawing.

From GestaltIT Tech Field Day

VM /ETC readers should recall that Randy gave me a tour of the HOL Datacenter at the bottom of the Moscone escalators in order to write a post about the design.(post linked in opening paragraph)

By the way, Randy told me GETO is already planning for the HOL infrastructure at VMware Partner Exchange and VMworld 2010.

Thoughts about mds QUADv and Xsigo

if you need alot of density out of a compact design, these two companies have the answer. The flexibility to change networking or storage protocols without wiring or changing hardware is an amazing feature. The Xsigo I/O Director and it’s ability to create virtual HBAs and NICs allows a stateless configuration transfer between uplinks, and Xsigo high lighted this point by explaining that as new technology is developed on their cards they can be easily swapped with the existing cards with minimal impact to the QUADv servers. Can anyone else fit 4 servers each with quad core processors and 48 GB RAM in 2U of rack space besides MDS?

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