ESX server design

[jonb157]

All, I want to design a blade solution using HP BL480 series. I have about 20 VM's that I want to virtualize. Most are 4 to 8GB in memory(I know I know, but they are real memory hogs) and 1 vCPU. I'm trying to find out how many blades I need to accomodate that. Is there a best practice specific to blade technology in scaling this stuff out? My VM's will probably total around 20vCPU's and 120GB of RAM once it's all said and done. I don't want to overdesign this, but at the same time, I want some decent overheard(20%) on my hosts for breathing room and future expansion.

[jayolsen]

Depends on how much memory you stuff in the blades. I'd think you could run 20 on two blades easily. That being said you will probably want to n+1 so three blades would be best. That way you can take one host offline for maintenance at any given time.

[jonb157]

What about if I have redundancy in mind? Would two blades across two enclosures work or is that a waste of money? The BL480's are Quad Core(the ones I'm looking at) with up to 48GB memory. BTW, I was thinking along the same lines; 3 blades with 32GB memory.

[jayolsen]

Yes you can go across enclosures but if they are in the same rack I don't know if you gain much. If your enclosure is built with redudancy (two OA's etc.) then you are looking at something powerwise more than likely taking out a whole rack.

We are running the 480c's and I love them.