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6 Replies Last post: May 20, 2008 10:19 AM by Raist

Physical hardware recommendation

May 20, 2008 6:37 AM

Raist 9 posts since
Mar 20, 2008

Hi all,

Basically I'm looking for some input as to physical hardware in the Dell arena. I will be purchasing either 2950's or 900's for a vm rollout / expansion, any input for hardware problems you have seen with either model or driver support for either model? I am planning on using dual port Gig ehternet cards in as many exapansion slots possible, but I may go up to quad Gig cards.

Reply Re: Physical hardware recommendation May 20, 2008 7:00 AM

weinstein5 2,560 posts since
Nov 19, 2005

The first step to sizing your ESX hosts is to understand the resource consumption of the physical machines your are wanting to virtualize - one you understand this then you replicate the resource needs of the machines to the esx hosts - so what type of applicaions/machines are oyu looking to virtualize?

Reply Re: Physical hardware recommendation May 20, 2008 7:09 AM

in response to: weinstein5

Raist 9 posts since
Mar 20, 2008

Well there's a huge group ranging from p3 with 256MB of ram to core 2 boxes with 2GB of ram. I believe that I have sized the environment correctly to allow for future growth and to virtualize all of the boxes that we can. My biggest concern is to get some input from anyone using one or both of these type of boxes to see if they have had any problems or querks with drivers or the box itself.

Reply Re: Physical hardware recommendation May 20, 2008 8:23 AM

in response to: Raist

azn2kew 1,330 posts since
Jun 21, 2006

It is important to work on assessment of your physical servers and your virtualization consolidation. I would work on Excel spreadsheets put down all the current production servers in place for RAM, CPU, Disk Storages and Application Roles and determine if it is feasible to deploy with ESX. Almost all Windows/Linux applications servers can be virtualize and effectively run within enterprise environment without any issues if you planned and architected with best practices in place and those concerns are storage, networking, database and general resources (CPU, RAM).

I'm a big fan of Dell PE 2950s and PE 6950s with 64GB in place you can virtualize pretty good number of VMs. You can average 8 VMs per cores, so if you're running 2 X Quad cores talking about 8 x 8 = 64 VMs. If you have 64GB RAM, reserve 1GB for SC/Vkernel so 63GB left you can run at least 30-40VMs on each machines. I've seen people running PE R900 series with 128GB RAM and that's a beefy box if you have the budget I would go for that but make sure to disable RAM settings in ESX Advance Settings so you can see 128GB total. I've seen this problem elsewhere will give you precise info if you're running 128GB ram on R900 series.

1. Storage ->FC/iSCSI/NFS neither of this is fine but your'e using beefy R900, you should have FC storage in place so no worries about your redundant systems in placed.
2. Networking->FC HBA should be at least 4GB bandwidth and use multipaths for failover Active/Passive mode.
3. VM networks should be redundant and enough bandwidth as well connected to multiple LAN switches/FC switches as well.
4. Database - SQL 2005 cluster and remote database replication, SQL log shipping and performance tuning as well. (Virtualized your VC server for extra redundancy)
5. Do not over allocated your virtual machines resources (vCPU and RAM) start with 1GB RAM and single vCPU and expand from there when it grows.
6. Technically, any applications servers can be virtualized and run fine if correctly implemented. If your shop is big and want to virtualized Exchange, SQL 2005, Oracle, GIS servers, you should consult VMware consultant for details because those are youre production servers and tend to have lots of dependencies and by implemented it right everything should be smooth.

Let us know if you have any questions, we can help you anytime!

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen
iGeek Systems Inc.
VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

Reply Re: Physical hardware recommendation May 20, 2008 8:56 AM

in response to: azn2kew

ToddMuirhead 14 posts since
Feb 13, 2006

I am actually hosting a web chat today on selecting a virtualization server on delltechcenter.com - Dell's online community for IT Professionals. You may find that you can connect with other customers during the chat as well as Dell engineers that will be on the chat as well. The link for the chat is:

http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/05-20-08+-+Selecting+a+Virtualization+Server+Chat

To specifically answer your question - It depends. How big of a deployment are you considering? With smaller deployments is often makes sense to go with 2950s so that you can have N+1 redundancy at a lower cost. In other words it costs less to have a spare 2950 than it does to have a spare r900. If you have a really big deployment - it may actually make sense to go with blade servers. Cable management is better. Port costs are lower. But a chassis holds up to 16 blade servers, so you would need to be close to filling it up for it to be a really great deal. I'm also working on building out a wiki page with links to resouces to help located here - http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/Selecting+a+Server+for+Virtualization .

Thanks - Todd

Reply Re: Physical hardware recommendation May 20, 2008 9:05 AM

in response to: ToddMuirhead

azn2kew 1,330 posts since
Jun 21, 2006

Here is a solution to make your PE R900 server to see all 128GB RAM under ESX.
http://communities.vmware.com/message/947312

Sounds like a good link, I'll chat with them to learn more goodies as well.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen
iGeek Systems Inc.
VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

Reply Re: Physical hardware recommendation May 20, 2008 11:23 AM

in response to: azn2kew

Raist 9 posts since
Mar 20, 2008

We are looking at having 22 current virtual machines and moving another 50 or so boxes to vm for an initial roll out, with all new servers being virtualized if possible. Currently what I'm seeing is very low CPU usage with mid memory usage ie 4 boxes running @ 0-10% and 1 box running @ 10-20% while memory is @ 50% or above. Granted I'm using a blade center with 2 xeon (basically p4's) procs and 8 GB of ram each. The new boxes must have intel processors (that's just the way our shop runs) so that makes a difference on what physical box we are getting. I am looking at building 5 900's as replacements with 3 being prod and 2 being DR or 7 2950's with 4 being prod and 3 being dr, either way with the virutal machines that are running I can afford to loose the resources of the entire prod side and still run the required boxes on the dr side.

So it looks like VM will run fine on either machine I choose to buy it's just up to logistics on which machine is best for my deployment.

One other queston, which proc is perferred intel or amd. One of the reasons that I posted this is because the 2950's can go up to 32GB of memory max and I would like the ability to expand memory on an as needed basis which is why I was looking at the R900. But if AMD is able to give close to the same performance and the hardware is as stable as the Intel then I can use a comparable box to the 2950 but have the ability to upgrade the memory since the Dell AMD boxes are able to go up to 64GB.

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