ESXi

I'm currently doing a small vmware vsphere 4 installation. We are converting 32 physical systems (Dell 2850, 1850, 1750, HP DL360G4, DL380G4, DL360G5, and DL380G5) to 4 ESX boxes.

I'm trying to determine the best configuration of our existing hardware and cannot decide if it would be better to use the DL380G5s or the DL360G5s as ESX boxes or the benefit of one over the other. All of these systems will require additional procs and memory so thats not a consideration.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have the following quantities of HPs

DL380G5 - 3

DL360G5 - 6

Hello.

I'm trying to determine the best configuration of our existing hardware and cannot decide if it would be better to use the DL380G5s or the DL360G5s as ESX boxes or the benefit of one over the other. All of these systems will require additional procs and memory so thats not a consideration.

Some things to think about:

1. How many networks are you going to need for each of your hosts?

2. Are you going to use HBAs in these hosts for attaching to strorage?

3. Will you utilize the direct attached storage for housing VMs?

4. Will you need to expand later and possibly require additional PCI cards?

5. Do your current workloads need 4 sockets or will your future workloads ever require 4 sockets to support?

Obviously, the DL380s are going to let you go bigger, but you have twice the number of DL360s to work with. This comes down to a scale up or out decision, but just make sure you have the slots to cover the NIC and HBA requirements. Twice the number of 360s won't be of much value, if you need to put in 4 additional network cards.

Good Luck!

Sorry after reading your response I do realize that I have left some important information out.

All VM storage will be on a SAN that will be accessed either iscsi or NFS (not yet determined also).

1. How many networks are you going to need for each of your hosts? - About 12 VLANs

2. Are you going to use HBAs in these hosts for attaching to storage? - No

3. Will you utilize the direct attached storage for housing VMs? - No

4. Will you need to expand later and possibly require additional PCI cards? - Plan to add at least 2 quad nics at conversion time.

5. Do your current workloads need 4 sockets or will your future workloads ever require 4 sockets to support? - Not sure what you mean by this question.

Is there any reason I can't mix and match HP DL360G5s with DL380G5s?