IBM x3850M2 running ESXi (3.5 & 4.0) Embedded has performance issues

[cookster]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone is running the embedded ESXi out there on the IBM x3850M2 and if so have they done any 'tweaking' to the default configuration.

I am finding, out of the box, they run fine but as a load comes on and the number of VM's increase I start to see timeouts in the perfomance graphs on the hosts. I have a suspicion that it has something to do with service console resources and have found some references to setting a different ScratchLocation but it seems to relate only to an older version of ESX and is related to HA.

Would like to here if anyone else has seen these drop outs.

Cheers

[Schorschi]

IBM does on believe or honor the results, but we have seen this in our lab testing of 3850s, and it is not specific to VMware, but has appended on Windows installed systems as well, even Windows Datacenter. The 3850 running MS SQL for example is a rocket, but when the backplane is flooded the 3850 x3 chipset seems to have some type of bottleneck. We spend over 6 months going back and back again to IBM and could never get IBM to really acknowledge the issue. We finally decided to not deploy the 3850 to the extent we planned, waiting for the next generation of the IBM Series X line, before we evaluated again. All I can say is of the 3850s we have deployed we have seen issues. IBM has struggled with those issues.