After a great deal of research, I bought a ML350G5. I need to consolidate many servers in my small office environment. Here are my observations:
ESXi installed without a hitch. According to the HCL, the ML350 is supported for ESX Server but not ESXi.
The ML350G5 is a great box for a small office where size and noise are important considerations. It's worth every penny.
I converted 5 W2K3/W2K8 VM's running in VM Server 1.0.6/W2K3 and VM Server 2.0/CentOS 5.2.
I installed W2K8 from scratch using an ISO image.
I had one problem with a VM I converted with custom settings. It converted it but I couldn't log in.
The ML350 performed well until I ran too many VM's and used all the memory.
Many thanks to the posters to this forum!
Hi Deems..
You experience is generally the norm when using "mainstream" hardware that is on the HCL .. good stuff!
could you supplying hardware configuration details including..CPU, Memory, Disk System (Qty disk, RAID, Stripe Size) and no of VM's? and workload type?
(gee'z he's not asking much
Helps with the big picture in hardware sizing for the rest of us.
bernie
I bought a stripped down system from HP to confirm that it would meet my needs and my small business customers' needs (I'm an IT consultant ramping up on VMware). HP offers a 30 day MBG. I wanted to make sure it would run ESXi with no mods, it was quiet enough for a small office, it performed well with a light load, I liked the box, VI Client and Converter worked as advertised and I could figure out an acceptable backup/restore solution. I fully understood that this configuration would only support 1 or 2 small VM's in a test environment.
Part # 470064-836 = HP Proliant ML350 G5 LFF Tower, Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor E5410 (2.33GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 80W), Smart Array E200i/128MB Controller (RAID 0/1/5), dual HP 1000-W Hot-Plug Power Supplies, HP 2GB Fully Buffered DIMM PC2-5300 2X1GB Memory, Embedded NC373i Multifunction Gigabit Network Adapter and CD/DVD.
Part# 458926-B21 = HP 250GB 3G SATA 7.2K Hot Plug SATA MDL Hard Drive.
I wasn't disappointed. Everything worked well, including VI Client and converting physical machines and VM server vm's. I then intentionally overloaded it to see how it would handle it. I've ordered 4 gb of additional memory and another 250 gb SATA hard drive that I will use to mirror the first. So far, I've run W2K3 domain controllers and Visual Studio development environments (VS 2005, VS2008, SQL 2005, asp.net). I'm going to convert an Exchange box after I install the additional memory. Then on to CentOS 5.2.
I must stress this is for a two user home office test environment and I only need to run a few small VM's that will fit in 250 gb and consume less than 6 gb of memory. But I'm still wondering if I should have purchased SAS drives. I started a thread on that question.
The ML350 gives me the option of purchasing VI3 with full support. The only down side of this box is that ESXi is not supported.
(Please excuse all the white space. What I see in my browser (Firefox or IE) when I'm editing doesn't jive with what I see after I post the message.)