Hello,

How many ESX hosts are you talking about? The HP C class blades are the perfect platform for virtualizing when you have a SAN. There is the chassis though with costs but if you will be filling it out, or getting even close, they can actually come in cheaper when you consider all TCO factors.

We went with the BL685c but you could look at the BL465c for the smaller server requirement you mentioned below. You could get 16 of those in a 10 U chassis.

We like AMD for our ESX servers so what ever way you go have a look at the [DL\ML\BL] xx5. The DL385 is a very well rounded box

Our approach seems to differs slightly from what most are doing. For our new 3.01 environment we are looking at bringing in single quad core machines with 16gb of ram. One license will allow us two physical machines in such a case. By the time you max the ram you would be getting close to consuming 1/2 to 3/4 of the available CPU. We plan on leaving available memory so this then leaves room to take on a couple more vm's easily with the available cpu capacity. We can purchase a cluster of 6-8 hosts in such a configuration and we are utilizing Enterprise so we have the HA options enabled on the cluster. This will allow us to drop about 50-70 physicals.

One of the biggest things I hear people say is: Ya but if you lose a cpu the whole box goes down. Valid point, but when is the last time you had a cpu fail? chances these days seem to be about 1 in a 100. Its a slim chance but a possibility none the less. You have more available boxes to take on the load of one failed host AND you are getting more bang for your buck buying one license pack for two phsyical boxes in which many cases a single server with 2xcpu is never run at capacity anyways, depending on your environment and how you look at.

The point of virtualizing is to reduce the amount of hardware yes but in some environments other approaches make sense as well.

We did this when we were first using starter licenses and received no indication we were breaking any EULA rules. Can anyone from VMware clarify this?

See this post...

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=648327&#648327

Please do.

Thanks esiebert. Even though a VMWare rep is who told me this was possible, dosent mean they are necessarily right. Will be good to have confirmed before we start down that road.