VMware Communities > Blogs > Virtualization Frontier > Tags

Blog Posts

Virtualization Frontier

4 Posts tagged with the poweredge tag
0

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

0 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: delltechcenter, poweredge, m905, m1000e, blade, bladeserver, bladecenter
0

A [thread started here|http://www.delltechcenter.com/thread/1670169/iSCSI+Enabled+NICs] on delltechcenter.com lead me to do some investigation into an "iSCSI Ready" feature of the onboard Broadcom 5708 NICs on the PowerEdge R805. Turns out that the Broadcom 5708 or NetExtreme II NIC has the capability to be a TCIP/IP offload engine (TOE) which is a fairly well known thing. It also can be a hardware based iSCSI adapter with some iSCSI offload capability as well - which is the "iSCSI Ready" feature. It is also possible to use this to boot from iSCSI as it is hardware based.

I had a really hard time finding the any documentation about how to configure and enable the iSCSI Ready feature, so I put together a really cool wiki page that has few screen-shots and some basic guidance. Additionally, I did a quick performance test to see if it did indeed reduce CPU utilization. I found that a small reduction with my test workload and posted a screen-shot of that as well.

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: iscsi, broadcom, r805, r905, 5708, bacs, dellltechcenter, poweredge
0

In the past I was somewhat biased towards 2-socket servers for virtualization - which was due to the results of some testing we did. I had of course realized over the past year or so that things had changed and the 4-socket servers were now more competitive. So when I ran the series of chats on Selecting a Server for Virtualization, I decided that it was a good opportunity to re-run some of those exact same tests with the brand new R900 that had arrived in the lab. I posted the results on a TechCenter page so you can see the full results, but the short summary is that the R900 stacks up as more efficient than the 2950 we tested in the previous paper. The R900 showed 10 to 23 percent better performance per watt than the older 2950. The question that remains is how would the R900 compare to a current generation 2950?

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: delltechcenter, 2-socket, 4-socket, virtualization, esx, 2950, r900, poweredge, performance
0

Our shipment of four brand new PowerEdge R805 servers arrived yesterday afternoon. We got them loaded up with Quad-Core AMD Opteron 2356 2.3 GHz processors, 64 GB of RAM, and a Quad-Port Intel NIC (in addition to the four onboard NICs). I just love opening up new servers and I was pretty excited to open these up and get them in the rack - but not as excited as this.

http://image.wetpaint.com/image/1/NuFWWbBCR6as_uZG8nGoQg92068/GW132H177

Here is a picture of the new servers in our lab from this morning. I have also uploaded a few more pictures in the Photo Gallery that show the inside of the R805, the included VMware ESX Server 3i, and the servers installed in the rack.

The only thing left to do now is use VMotion to get some VMs onto these systems and put them to work.

Todd

0 Comments Permalink Tags: delltechcenter, r805, poweredge, esx, esx3i, 3i

ToddMuirhead

 Member since: Feb 13, 2006

Some Stuff on Enterprise Virtualization from DellTechCenter

View ToddMuirhead's profile