using HP blades with Dell servers in one cluster

[max2479]

Hi,

I am getting HP c7000 chassis (10G) but with 2 blade servers for now and planning to use them as esxi. I have another 2 dell (r610/r710) servers that I want add to the same datacenter/cluster.  Does anyone see the problem with this setup?

CPU will be addresses by configuring EVC. what about networking, any issues with using blade servers 10G and dell servers with 1G?

vMotion problems?

FT problems?

DRS?

Thanks in advance

[Josh26]

Hi,

Only thing I would point out is to make two groups in your Update Manager, so you can assign updates like the HP ESXi bundle to the HP blades, and the (presumably) Dell equivalent to Dell servers.

There are not 10G vs 1G issues that I can see. vmotion problems will be all addressed by EVC if configured appropriately. If the CPUs are compatible, this may not even matter.

Note you can just as easily get CPU incompatabilities just by buying two slightly different models of the same blade.I have two identical BL460 G6's that I can't vMotion between at the moment because I only turned on the Executable Memory Protection on one blade's BIOS

[max2479]

Thank you for helpful response.

what if i am doing storage vmotion of multiple VMs from 10G to 1G? how will it handle traffic if I exceeded 1G?

[Josh26]

max2479 wrote:

Thank you for helpful response.

what if i am doing storage vmotion of multiple VMs from 10G to 1G? how will it handle traffic if I exceeded 1G?

Traffic won't exceed 1G because that's the bottleneck. I wouldn't imagine it would be any different to a 1Gb bottleneck anywhere else in your network.

[EdWilts]

I have a mix of Dell R710 systems and HP BL460c G7 blades in the same cluster.  They happen to have the same CPU (X5670) and the same memory (96GB).  All have 10g connectivity.  We've had no problems whatsoever (except that the Dells are a piece of crap to work on, even for the field service folks).  We have the same shared (NFS) shared storage presented to both.

The one thing you have to be careful of in your environment is if you have a guest that actually needs 10g connectivity - you'll want to do some host affinity DRS rules to make sure you don't inflict pain on your customers if the guest vMotions to a Dell host.

We do have separate baselines in Update Manager as somebody else suggested.