Anyone using IBM x3650 servers for ESX and VDI?

[hmartin]

We are piloting View with a single ESX server today, an IBM x3850 with 4 Quad-core E7330 2.4GHz CPUs, 64GB of RAM, 6 active NICs, and a DS3400 for storage. With this architecture, we have achieved about 5 VMs / core. Other than occasional McAfee updates and SMS activities (both of which have a major performance impact on all VMs), performance of the VMs is acceptable. Our goal is to achieve 5-6 VMs / core.

As we prepare to move to a production environment similar to what we have for our virtual servers, I want the new servers to have the Intel Nehalem CPUs. However, these CPUs are not available in the x3850, but they are available in the x3650. The x3650 is also less expensive, so it would help our business case. However, we were advised (by IBM) that the architecture of the x3850 is going to allow it to run 4-6 VMs per core, but that the x3650 may not.

So, anyone out there running ESX 3.5 on an IBM x3650 hosting Win XP VMs? If so, please share your experiences. Thanks.

[jcbass]

We are currently running 60+ production vm's across 4 dual core 3650's clustered with 60gb ram each, mostly win2k3 and apx 10 xp vdi's (I'm about to add load testing of apx 100+ vdi xp's in the next few weeks). We have run multiple load tests with only a single dual core 3650 running esx 3.5 with 50+ win2k3 vm's running various db type applications. Whereas I would not do this in a production environment, the load testing was very successful. Never did the machine peek higher than 80/85 percent cpu, memory, or network bandwidth usage. For our production vm's, we heavily monitor all areas of performance and none have crossed a threshold. Even more important, none of our customers have seen issues to complain about (and they have so wanted to, lol). Our results may be on the extreme side, but from our testing the harder you push the 3650's the better they seem to perform. We plan on running and monitoring for a few more months, and then if still possitive we will be adding 4 additional systems. Then as growth demands it, we will change out to the cpu's to higher core values.

[hmartin]

Thanks for the response. Those are some impressive numbers. For your W2K3 and XP VMs, what is your typical RAM allocation? Also, are all of your VMs have a single vCPU?