Virtualization Edge

Dell M905 Blade Server Unboxing Video in One Take

ToddMuirhead — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 05:01:45 GMT

Last week we received a couple of new PowerEdge M905 blade servers for the DellTechCenter lab. The PowerEdge M905 is a new full-height blade for the PowerEdge M1000e chassis that supports up to four AMD Opteron processors and 24 DIMM slots. To have a little fun we decided to record the unboxing and deployment into our chassis. We had a few challenges in getting everything set up to record the video as both of our laptops did not have Webcams, but we were able to borrow an XPS M1530 and use that to record.

We did the video on the first take with Scott recording and me talking and pointing. I was going to edit out the beginning where we are talking about getting started and also the end where we are trying to find the Stop button, but I decided it was much better with these parts in. If you watch closely you can see Scott's head at the end of the video as he is trying to click on Stop.

Todd

Iniside IT Video is Still True

ToddMuirhead — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:15:00 GMT

I didn't get a chance last week to draw attention to the nice video that Marc Farley put up on the InsideIT blog last week about our TechCenter web chats. Marc is a regular attendee of our weekly chat sessions and he is also the lead blogger on InsideIT. The video is cool, short, and just as relevant this week as last. This week's chat (Tues 3 PM CST) will be about when to select blades for your virtualization server platform.

Todd

Oodles of NICs for ESX

ToddMuirhead — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:10:00 GMT

Back in the ESX 2.5 days it was a common recommendation to have at least 3 NICs for ESX. One NIC each for the service console, VMotion, and VMs. It was really a waste for many to have to dedicate an entire NIC for the low network traffic to the service console. Then with ESX 3 the networking features became more flexible, and you could easily setup the service console to share a NIC with VMotion or the VMs.

The M600 and M605 blades for the Dell M1000e blades chassis now have two on-board NICs and the option to add two more I/O cards, each with two ports of either Ethernet or fibre channel. This means that you can have four NICs and two fibre channel ports for storage OR six NICs with 2 dedicated to iSCSI for storage. The four available NICs for VM data traffic is usually enough, although I admit there are always exceptions.

So if the I/O options on the blades are not enough there are options with the R805 and R900 and R905 that offer oodles of NICs. Specifically the R805 has four on-board NICs and four PCI slots. Filling these slots with your required mix of quad-port NICs and dual-port fibre channel HBAs would be a great solution for environments that have high requirements of physical NICs to support their VMware environment.

Todd

Ultimate Power Efficiency with Blades and Virtualization?

ToddMuirhead — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:31:00 GMT

A recent thread here on delltechcenter asked for a power consumption comparison between the PowerEdge 1950 1U rack mount server vs the PowerEdge M600 blade. It turns out that there are a few whitepapers that have been done on 2950 power consumption and a big study on the blades power consumption - but nothing I can find that directly compares the two. The best way to get a comparison between just about any current or recent Dell server is to use the Dell Datacenter Capacity planner. It allows you to build out a rack of servers and get an estimate of power consumption.

If you use similar configurations for 16 PowerEdge 1950s and a full M1000e chassis (16 blades) then the blades configuration will consume less power. So you can save a significant amount of power by going with blades over similar traditional rack mount servers.

If you combine the efficiencies of the blades with the efficiencies of running lots of VMs on a single physical server - you might have the ultimate in power efficiency. This is one reason to use blades for virtualization - we'll be chatting about this and other reasons next week in our TechTuesday chat.

Todd