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guusmeeuwis
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Best HP choice for ESX

Atm we're seriously considering vmware's Infrastructure 3 instead of Vmware Server for our development servers (10 testservers for various applications). We could virtualize with VM Server but ESX is a more solid choice when looking to the future (we might virtualize parts of our production next year).

We've used some capacity planner which resulted in these stats:

  • 1 ESX server

  • 10 VM's

* 8ghz CPU needed



* 10gb Memory needed



* We are also working on a SAN, so dont worrie about the storage part.</div>

Because of our lack of experience with VMware, could some1 help me out and share some experience with ESX on HP servers? Any best buy? How about the DL360 G5, or DL380 G5?

Any suggestions? Thanks!

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TomHowarth
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My personal choice would be for the DL380 as it has better espansion capabilities for NIC cards, if that is not an issue than a DL360 G5 is an excelent choice both servers support more than the 10Gb of memory needed and if you purchase the Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor X5460 (3.16 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB) processor option you will have more than enought umpf, however you should be able to get away with the Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor E5420 (2.50 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB) option.

Remember to purchase the biggest DIMMs you can afford, in my opinion the price diferential between 4GB DIMMS and 2GB DIMMS is still too great so go for 2GB sticks,

As you are going for a SAN then just purchase 2x36Gb 15K SAS disks.

Then just purchase your HBA of choice FC or iSCSI

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Kind Regards

Tom,

Tom Howarth VCP / VCAP / vExpert
VMware Communities User Moderator
Blog: http://www.planetvm.net
Contributing author on VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment
Contributing author on VCP VMware Certified Professional on VSphere 4 Study Guide: Exam VCP-410

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TomHowarth
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My personal choice would be for the DL380 as it has better espansion capabilities for NIC cards, if that is not an issue than a DL360 G5 is an excelent choice both servers support more than the 10Gb of memory needed and if you purchase the Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor X5460 (3.16 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB) processor option you will have more than enought umpf, however you should be able to get away with the Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor E5420 (2.50 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB) option.

Remember to purchase the biggest DIMMs you can afford, in my opinion the price diferential between 4GB DIMMS and 2GB DIMMS is still too great so go for 2GB sticks,

As you are going for a SAN then just purchase 2x36Gb 15K SAS disks.

Then just purchase your HBA of choice FC or iSCSI

If you found this or any other post helpful please consider the use of the Helpful/Correct buttons to award points

Kind Regards

Tom,

Tom Howarth VCP / VCAP / vExpert
VMware Communities User Moderator
Blog: http://www.planetvm.net
Contributing author on VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment
Contributing author on VCP VMware Certified Professional on VSphere 4 Study Guide: Exam VCP-410
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jhanekom
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Any of the certified G5 boxes are excellent buys (including the two you mentioned):

The DL585 G2 and DL580 G5 are very popular choices around the forums due to their high core and maximum memory counts, as well as their proven track records.

If you're looking to start smaller, the ML370's are also worth a look. Although they have a large footprint compared to the DL3xx servers, they have a much larger maximum memory capacity (64GB vs. 32GB.) This gives them the same CPU corecount-to-memory ratio as the DL58x servers. (8GB/CPU core.)

It has been my experience that memory is usually the first thing to run out. Once it runs out and you need to expand capacity, you end up having to buy more hardware as well as additional VMware ESX licenses, potentially making the DL3xx servers more expensive in the long run.

Get quotes on a few models and do a cost-comparison with a couple of memory scenarios you're likely to encounter.

-aZrEn-
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matuscak
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We've been using the DL380s for our traditional (non-VMware) machines, but when we decided to build an ESX server, we changed to the DL360. (We also brought in a SAN at the same time as the ESX system.) As for the reasons, while the 380 does have more expansion room, when I look our installed 380s, we haven't expanded them beyond what would fit in a 360. The 360 also takes up less room in the rack, and is a bit cheaper as well. With the move to the SAN, the internal disk storage advantage of the 380 doesn't matter either. At least for us, the 360 has been a good fit.

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petedr
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We have been using a number of DL385s and they have worked great in our envivonments, although these are AMD processors versus the 380s which are Intel, think the DL380 would be a good choice as well.

www.thevirtualheadline.com www.liquidwarelabs.com
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Rob_Bohmann1
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For 10 dev boxes, more than likely, 1 x 380/385 with dual or quad cores would be overkill. If you do not have shared storage, then there is not much reason to buy a second server. If you have shard storage, then maybe go with 2 360's so you have some redundancy and can vmotion for esx host maintenance.

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guusmeeuwis
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Why would it be an overkill?

If we put ESX in the SAN project we can play around with the extra options provided in Infrastructure 3.. but as stated we only are going to use vmware for our testservers atm. Maybe in a later state we will virtualize some of our production servers...

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guusmeeuwis
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Number

Description

Count

* Price*



418315-421

HP Proliant DL380R05 X/5160-2 4GB (2 x DC 3,0Ghz (1x4MB cache) 1333 FSB/4 x 1024MB/SA P400i-512/BBWC/RPS/DVD-cd-rw)

1


4230.00

HA104A3

HP 3y 4h 24x7 HW Support

1


0.00

HA104A3 7G3

Proliant ServerDL38x HWSupport

1

1097.00

HA114A1

HP Installation and Startup Service

1

0.00

HA114A1 5A6

300 Series Hardware Installation

1

376.00

397413-B21

4 GB memory module (PC2 5300 Fully Buffered DIMMs / DDR2 / 2 x 2GB)

1

420.00

397415-B21

8 GB memory module (PC2 5300 Fully Buffered DIMMs / DDR2 / 2 x 4GB)

1

1550.00

375859-B21

36.4-GB 10K SFF SAS harddisc option (10K, SFF SAS, hot pluggable)

1

215.00

435508-B21

HP NC364T PCIe 4Pt Gigabit Server Adptr

1

385,00



price

7888.00

Thank you for all your usefull replies and sharing your experience!

How about this setup, full covered the areas?

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