Dell PowerEdge R710

[SuperDave1971]

Good morning everyone. I was wondering if anyone has used the Dell PowerEdge R710 for VM hosting and what is the ration of hosts? I am trying to find a resonable server (cost and performance wise) that could host multiple instances of VMware 4 for a city consolidation project I am currently working on. What are the specs that your company is using?

I am not new to VMware but I am new to this project. I am hoping to provide reasonable examples for consolidation and I was looking at the PowerEdge R710 server.

Any information would be most helpful.

Thank you so much in advance,

-Dave P.

[JasonVmware]

Hello

THe Dell PowerEdge R710 does perform well and can be loaded up with a good amount of cpu/memory. Some things to watch out for is the memory bug with the NM cpu's which i've commented on:

Also the iDRAC on the M710's give a false positive with CPU utalization but Dell is working on it and there is a work around which I describe in the same article. These are just some things to be aware of but the server can be used and has very good performance.

Also if you are using iSCSI for storage I would suggest 6-8 psyhical nics to get best performance.

Hope this helps !

If you have any further questions just let me know.

[azn2kew]

I've been using Dell PE 2950, 6950, 6850 and R905 and they works really well and reliable. R710 should be great too and depends how much RAM you've purchase that will account to how many VMs per host ratio. I suggest not hosting more then 12-16 VMs per hosts so you do not experience IO problems and SCSI Reservation conflicts. You can raise up to 144GB RAM (18 DIMMS) that you can run a lot of VMs but price per DIMMS are expensive, so determine how many VMs will be deploy in your environment and divide it between 10-16 VMs per host than you should get an idea how many R710 you're going to need. Usually 32-64GB of RAM should be sufficient but it varies if you put high load VMs like Exchange, SQL, Oracle etc...so plan accordingly.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[dnetz]

Hi,

I've been running eight R710's (2x2,66Ghz, 48GB RAM, Intel VT Quad Port Ethernet) in two separate ESX 3.5 clusters over NFS since June and they're running great. They haven't been subjected to that much load yet since the project they're running is in a test phase, but one of the clusters are running 40 VM's right now with lots of room left. I'd say with our light to medium loaded machines, we could probably run 20-30 VM's per host without too much problems. I had to replace a motherboard that would report errors post-boot after a complete power failure but no other problems so far. I'd say there's more than enough CPU performance in these machines for most loads, memory is more static though so it gets eaten away faster, make sure you account for this when planning your hardware.

- Daniel