Aaron Delp’s BladeVault.info site reports about calculators from HP and IBM that can help you plan for power when considering physical server consolidation by implementing blades. IBM’s calculator is a downloadable .msi while HP’s is an online calculator. HP also offers a downloadable offline version which has limited functionality compared to the online tool. IBM’s calculator is not just limited to blades as it computes power figures for all x series servers.
VMware’s Performance Team posted an amazing article this week on the VROOM! blog. 16,000 Exchange Mailboxes, 1 Server not only offers insights on how to configure Exchange 2007 VMs to support large numbers of mailboxes, but it shows that ESX 3.5 and ESX 3i allow applications to utilize hardware resources that exceed the vendor’s recommended maximums in a physical deployment. Although this test was able to squeeze the Exchange 2007 implementation on a single ESX host without degrading the user experience, the technical details of how it was done provides administrators a blueprint to spread the Exchange VMs across multiple ESX hosts and fully leverage ESX Enterprise features.
“We did this test because we have felt for a while that advances in processor and server technology were about to leave another widely-used and important application unable to fully utilize the hardware that vendors were offering. Microsoft has guidelines on what environment works well with Exchange, and a system with more than eight CPUs and/or 32GB of RAM is beyond the recommended maximums.
Hardware vendors are now offering commodity servers with 16 cores
IBM is running a VMware ESX evaluation promotion through December 31, 2008. Details about the promotion can be found at IBM System x and BladeCenter with VMware.
From the IBM site:
For a limited time, you can try VMware® Infrastructure 3 software when you purchase a VMware ServerProven® System x server or BladeCenter chassis. The eligible products are shipped with a flyer that entitles you to register for a 90-day evaluation license for VMware Infrastructure 3. Once registered, you will receive an email with your VMware Infrastructure license activation code and easy instructions on how to get started.
The promotional 90 day evaluation is an extension to the normal 60 day evaluation offered from the VMware.com downloads site.
Although closely working with your favorite VMware partner can also get you extended evaluation periods for ESX anyways, this promotion is worth mentioning for companies that are considering implementing Blades in their data center. A Blade Center is an effective option for reducing your server sprawl without virtualization, and with the ability now to have up to 6 nics and 32 mb of ram in some blade servers makes implementing VI3 on blades a great decision.
Packages including server hardware, Virtual Iron 4.0 and implementation services are now being offered from IBM and HP. Virtual Iron has also signed a reseller agreement with Dell. The combination of these new partnerships is positioning the VMware alternative as a highly visible choice for SMBs looking to migrate to a virtual datacenter.
An article from SearchServerVirtualization.com, Virtual Iron, IBM, HP package virtualization on blades for SMBs, reports on Virtual Iron’s new SMB strategy:
Normally you must enable hyper threading in your server’s BIOS before ESX will report it as enabled on the Configuration tab in the Processors section.
For some reason IBM’s HS21 blade with Intel 5160 Xeon processors incorrectly reports hyper-threading by ESX as supported but not enabled. I thought I was losing it when I could not find where to enable hyper-threading in the blade’s BIOS. Turns out the only Intel processor that uses hyper-threading is the Pentium 4 workstation processor.
In fact, the entire family of Intel 5100 server processors do not have hyper-threading. For that matter, Intel does not make a server processor with hyper-threading.
Are you using IBM System X servers to run ESX? Are you planning on expanding your current VI with new IBM X series servers? Not sure which blades are compatible? Use this guide to make sure you do not create a vmotion boundary!
Although this is an IBM publication it does cover general processor compatibility. There are 3 tables. Table A is for IBM server compatibilties, Table B (incorrectly labeled as the first Table C) is for all Pentium processor compatibilities, and Table C is for all AMD processor compatibilities.
VMware VMotion Compatibility Guide for IBM System X and BladeCenter Servers
