It does make for interest thinking, but what has changed to cause this?
A current install of ESX takes about 16GB, going on memory here, sure some of that is swap and drivers, low hanging fruit that can easily be removed.
But what else has been removed? Maybe they are just SAN booting, or PXE booting or is ESX Lite a very different product?
I think the bit of greatest impact is the removal of the hard drive, arguable the source of most failures in a server. It will be interesting to see the server hardware vendor response to this. A server with no spindles, or IDE/SCSI controller boards and therefore more space for memory.
On the Dell server my details date back to February time frame, the RAM spec was 128gb, if this is done with 4GB modules it means 32 memory slots, which is a lot of motherboard real estate. Of course they could go with memory daughter boards or similar,
8gb modules, of course if they have tossed out the hard drives and controllers that they do have all that space
Unfortunately VMware play their cards very close to their chest, so I doubt we'll get any official comment from them.
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glynnd1
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