vSphere and Cisco B-Series Blade servers

[gavinmansell]

Looking in to the possibility of using some B-Series Blades as hosts. Has anyone any experience with this configuration? I can see from the compatibilty guide that they are not capable of fault tollerance - what exactly does this mean? No HA capabilities? No DRS?

[weinstein5]

If they are on the HCL they should be fine for HA and DRS - Fault Tolerance (FT) is a new feature of vSphere that gives you a higher of availability by allowing in the event of host failure for the VM to instantaneously over to a 'shadow' VM - FT does require the Enterpris level of licensing - 

[ChrisDearden]

I run vSphere 4.1 on b series UCS blades - HA & DRS nwork just fine. I've not tested FT. Have you got the document that mentions the lack of compatability?

[gavinmansell]

Hi,

It wasn't in a document I'm afraid. I used this search feature to search for the servers

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php

Once you find the B-Series Blades you can then click on model/release details and it has a check list which shows that FT isn't available.

Example here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/detail.php?device_cat=server&device_id=14822

[malaysiavm]

I had been deployed multiple environment running with Cisco B Series either M1 or M2, and all of them is working fine with HA, DRS, vmotion and EVC enable. Is certified to run VMware vSphere 4.