Hardware Platform

[jpoling]

We are currently an IBM shop. Our four host cluster runs on IBM x3950s. Our management team is beginning to contemplate changing to Dell for our server platform. I would appreciate any and all experiences with IBM vs Dell. What hardware do you use for ESX? Have you seen any difference in ESX performance between dell and IBM? Are consolidation ratios better or worse on any given hardware?

Thanks for any insight and opinions.

Jeff

[ejward]

The 3950 is a BIG box. Are you doing an 8-socket box? Dell doesn't have anything comparable with that. IBM suggested that I use the 3950 with an additional chassis just to get the extra memory slots. It ended up being more expensive than buying 5 Dell 2950's with 16GB of RAM each. So, that's what we did. Plus, our load is spread out across more servers. It's not as easy to patch as having just two 3950's but, it's worked out well for us.

Now, Dell has the R805. It has 16 DIMM slots like the IBM 3950. So you should also be able to stuff them with a lot of memory faily cheaply. We've been pretty happy with Dell.