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ablej
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Dell or IBM Blades

We our currently looking at implementing Blades in our VI3 environment. So I just wanted to see if anyone had any comments or complaints about their experience with Dell or IBM blades.

David Strebel

www.holy-vm.com

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malaysiavm
Expert
Expert

Personal experience, is depend what you want to achieve. Blade might not suit for big number of consolidation you would like to do example when we talk about 30:! or 40:1

If I have to pick both of them, I will choose DELL instead of IBM. Just because of the cost, support and reliability. Btw, if you have the budget for blade, you may have enough budget to look for some bigger server example like hp proliant, DELL poweredge R900, IBM 4 way cpus servers too. I think it make more sense for long term solution.

Malaysia VMware Communities -

Craig vExpert 2009 & 2010 Netapp NCIE, NCDA 8.0.1 Malaysia VMware Communities - http://www.malaysiavm.com
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mreferre
Champion
Champion

Malaysiavm,

can you be more specific with this:

> support and reliability

We for sure want our product to be (at least) as good as Dell's so whatever complain/experience you have I'd like to hear.......

Thanks.

Massimo.

Massimo Re Ferre' VMware vCloud Architect twitter.com/mreferre www.it20.info
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Aceh_King
Contributor
Contributor

BladeCenter H with LS41's - proper good kit (with an NetApp rebadged storage backend) ROCK SOLID

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kingsfan01
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

David,

You'll find that the responses to your question are largely going to be driven solely off of the equipment people work with and most don't work with multiple vendors. I have the IBM BladeCenter H with HS21 & HS21XM blades that I am very happy with in my DR site and will soon be implementing at our Datacenter as well. I cannot comment on Dell blades having never used them, however, my experience with Dell support in the past has been nothing but negative (even with their upgraded support contracts). My past experiences were enough to drive me from them to HP and IBM because at the end of the day, all vendors produce a product that is going to do the same thing... but when it breaks, it's all about who can give you the best support. I've had nothing but good luck with IBM, but that may just be my experience.

I wrote a reply about my systems and a few challenges encountered here: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1076272

Let me know if you have any questions or want any additional information.

Good luck!

Tyler

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MikeCampabello
Contributor
Contributor

I do work with multiple vendors hardware. My personal opinion is any of the top companies are going to work well and its a personal choice. I've had HP/Compaq, IBM, and Dell. Things do change over the years. So having a bad experience with one companies support can change over time. One pain that HP/Compaq had at one time, which I don't know if they do any more or not, is you needed a service contract number that was on paper format. Any time I called support I would have to riffle through all these support contracts to find the machine that was having trouble. Other than that the support was good. IBM I had no issues with either...servers ran good and never had any major issues. I have mainly Dell servers now and I've had one drive failure in a machine that has been running for 5 years (24/7) year round. I do like the service tag system they have and the support website. I rarely need to call them for anything.

Bottom line is I do consulting work for our clients and really never had any major issues with any of the big three. It really comes down to what you prefer, IMO. I'm happy with our Dell servers. And I was also happy when I had IBM, HP/Compaq servers in house other than the support contract library I had to maintain.

My .02

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ablej
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

We are currently looking at the Bladecenter H with H21's. I think the most important aspect with the Blade system will be support, since we are new to the Blade arena. We currently have all Dell servers no Blades though so right now we are dealing with a IBM solution provider to help implement the Blade system if purchased. Also as a side note I noticed that the IBM's have Cisco switches with fiber uplinks as where the Dell only has Ethernet Uplinks. What kind of performance will we loose if we go with a Ethernet Uplinks? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks

David Strebel

www.holy-vm.com

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David Strebel www.david-strebel.com If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful"
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mikepodoherty
Expert
Expert

We've been on IBM LS20s for a couple of years - over 100 ESX hosts and no major problems.

Tech support from IBM has been quick and effective.

Don't have experience with Dell blades.

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kingsfan01
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I don't think you will lose any performance by going copper ethernet vs. fiber... your environment should dictate your decision. For example, if you are interconnecting the blade center with a switch (with RJ45 ports) within the same datacenter, distance shouldn't be an issue and you'd be fine with copper. If you are interconnecting between devices at runs over 300', you should look to fiber. If you are connecting to a switch that is populated with fiber ports and has no available copper ports, go fiber. The one performance issue to note is that typically, fiber ports on switches are line speed and don't have issues with shared memory of the other ports so if you are planning on doing something like iSCSI and using the fiber switches for interconnection, you may get better performance (you probably wouldn't notice any difference in all actuality though).

If it were my call, I'd go copper and save some dough.

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ablej
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Does anyone know if IBM will be realeasing a new Bladecenter H or new H21's that will scale to at least 64Gb of RAM in the near future?

David Strebel

www.holy-vm.com

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David Strebel www.david-strebel.com If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful"
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depping
Leadership
Leadership

dell + emc san -> rock solid.

it's all a matter of personal taste and experience. I had some bad experience with IBM support over the last years, but I had the same with Dell and HP. In the end they're not that far apart from each other. Try to do a site visit somewhere who got the actual setup you are looking into...



Duncan

Blogging: http://www.yellow-bricks.com

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mcowger
Immortal
Immortal

We are running great on a bunch of M600 blades from dell.

--Matt

--Matt VCDX #52 blog.cowger.us
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williambishop
Expert
Expert

I second the HS21 IBM's. Great for us, they've been in production for a couple of years, with no issues that I remember. Nearly a hundred hosts, running 2400 vm's(yes, you can get high density on blades, I never cease to be amazed when someone says you can't--It's much more expensive to build up with 4 and 8 ways than out with blades). Blades=density....PERIOD.

My recommendation if you do the IBM's is to put in some extra money and get the extra ethernet modules(going from 2). It makes it more flexible, though it will perform fine with the 2 standard switches.

I'd also recommend a decent storage array, with a lot of cache...it's a game changer.

--"Non Temetis Messor."
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ablej
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

We are leaning toward the IBM H21's they just meet are requirement better. We are also looking at adding a IBM 6040 N Series SAN. The biggest issue with the HS21's is the Max memory of 32Gb. I know the LS41's allow up to 64Gb, but we are really looking to stay with a Intel chip to help smotth the migration from are current enviroment.

David Strebel

www.holy-vm.com

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David Strebel www.david-strebel.com If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful"
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williambishop
Expert
Expert

I would imagine they will end up supporting 64G at some point(probably in the near future on the XM blades), but it's always been my experience that memory is your cap until you hit about 32G. After that, it swaps and CPU becomes your limiting factor. Oversubscription of memory(a good thing) means that 32G supports more than 32G of allocated memory. One of the few reasons in my book to go to a larger box(4 or 8 way) is for this (though it is very seldom necessary). However, it's far cheaper to simply put a very few vm's on a new blade with 32 G than it is to buy the much more expensive 4 or 8 way.

That said, if you do need to go this way, I recall that HP and Dell both can go higher. Personally, I like HP blades, but they do tend to change chassis designs so frequently that you get whiplash. Meanwhile the HS chassis supports a lot more(including P series blades---which we're in the process of buying for AIX support) for a lot longer.

As a storage administrator, Blades have made my life far easier....I'm happy with them.

--"Non Temetis Messor."
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mikepodoherty
Expert
Expert

I believe so - the new LS42 models will support 128 GB - they are due out any time now. We've been happy with the LS series so I didn't pay as much attention to the H series blades during the product brief.

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Rockapot
Expert
Expert

IBM BladeCenter with LS41's --> Rock Solid..., will be interested to hear what people have to say regarding Dell equipment as the non blade R905's look good so I am interested in their blade's

Carl

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Hairyman
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

The company that i work for has Dell 1955 blades plus a EMC CX3-20 on fibre as well as all Dell servers, we had Compaq before they became HP, we have two 12 month old Cisco rebadged HP servers, one of them has just had both disk drives replaced (mirror). That still took longer than Dell for the parts to arrive !!

Our Dell stuff just keeps going, their support is excellent. I ring them, tell the person on the other end of the phone what i need and it is generally here the next morning with a technician if required. our old Compaq stuff took days and had to go through the reseller

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williambishop
Expert
Expert

It comes down to your support contract. We have IBM on 24x7365. We call, we get a callback in 15 minutes, hot parts can be onsite in as little as an hour(we once had them taxi a part from atlanta to us--at their expense).

I've only had one bad IBM experience, when we got some guy in India named bob who would not listen as I told him what the problem was, but rather insisted upon going through the procedural(what normally took 2 minutes and a "yes sir, we'll have that right out to you" took all day. Happily, it was a non-critical. . He was brand new, and after a complaint, we were back to normal after a week, no sign of bob since.

I like IBM support. My experiences with HP and Dell have never come up to the mark yet.

--"Non Temetis Messor."
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