Best Hardware-HP for VI 3.01

[pwcnash]

Hi,

I have been asked to draft a hardware spec requirement for a new Vmware Virtual Infrastructure 3.01 that will host around 10 VMs. Most of them are going to be 64 bit OS. My company prefers HP servers and I am researching the system compatibility guide to select a server for VI 3.01. For initial stages, we are going to have only 4 vms on the server and later a SAN is going to be used for additional VMs. Can any one tell me a HP server best suited for my case?

Thanks,

Nash

[taylorb]

I've got 3 ML570s. They are pretty much the same spec as the DL580, but with a giant expandable chassis (6U and heavy as a fridge!). They are about the same price as the 580s but you can put like 12 expansion cards and 18 Hard disks in them. Just thought it would be nice to play it safe and have room to upgrade if needed since I have a lot of rack space. It is pretty easy to fill up all your PCI slots when you have several NICs, HBAs and Disk controllers in the same box. The ML series doesn't have AMD versions though, so that is something to think about. If you want 2 Socket, then the ML 370 is the 2 CPU version.

[sizarraga]

Proliant DL380 G5 Quad Core is a good option today. With it you can get 8 cores at good price.

With Quad Core you can get more granularity.

AMD Opteron is an excellent option, but doesn´t have QuadCore yet. When AMD QuadCore be available it wiil be the best option, but today i thing Intel Quad Core is the best option. This means DL380 G5.

Regards

SLT

[SFlaherty]

Our latest HP purchase were 16 each BL460c Blades with dual quad core intel procs. We had a couple of ESX hosts running on BL45p blades but were running into a lot of anti AMD sentiment from some of our vendors (still a lot of ignorance out there about what x86 architecture is). While this is extreme overkill for a small deployment, smal deployments usually become big ones once people see the value of a solid ESX infrastructure.