Hardware Recommendation?

[Borat_Sagdiev]

Hello all,

Has anyone used the Dell PowerEdge 2950 with quad-core Xeons for ESX? I am currently in a PowerRecon phase with a client using these as a template for hosting. I know these are fairly new, the client is established on the Dell 29/850 platform though they do not have any quad-cores in place as of yet.

Thanks!

[msmenne17]

The 2950 is a good platform with the Quad-Core procs. Quad-Core is very well suited to VM use.

In my previous job, I was going to implement HP servers with 2 x Quad-Core procs. In my current position, we are using the Dell 2950s with Quad-Core procs. They seem to be working very well.

We havne't gone to production yet and haven't really load tested yet, but everything has gone well so far with testing.

Michael

[rlaurnoff]

Michael,

Thats good to hear. We just put an order with for a PE 2950 w/ 2xQuad Core and going to start testing with ESX. We are hoping its going to work wonders for us

[jdvcp]

I have used these systems extensively with ESX3.0.1 Work like a charm. Just make sure you patch everything. Also, turn on VT in the BIOS since it does not come enabled.

Another major issue we had was with DRAC Virtual Media. We had to disable Virtual Media in the DRAC BIOS. Even though I had no true virtual media attached, the DRAC virtual floppy caused issues and created a phantom floppy disk which caused my systems to hang during boot while using NaviAgent. This probably only applies to using NaviAgent, but may come up if you have any other agents on the service console for SAN utilties, etc

[mikeddib]

We are a Dell shop and have 2850's and we had problems when we put the quad cores in place specifically because of differences in the processors. The quad cores support extensions that are not supported in the dual cores, and forcing the changes is not supported and caused some of our VMs to be unstable.

I highly recommend you go through this presentation (http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/tac1356.pdf) from VMWorld '06. It was a ton of help and I highly recommend a tool from the run-virtual site (http://www.run-virtual.com/files/VMotionInfo.zip) which queries Virtual Center and gives you all the processor information you would need to compare.

The 2950 platform is great, we had a ton of VMs running on it, the issue was specific to VMotion between single and dual cores to the quad core platform. If you could separate the clusters or live with cold migration you would avoid these issues. Just my two cents and a heads up from someone who had VMs powering off on their own...

[Borat_Sagdiev]

Thanks for the info. After further consideration I am going to recommend fewer 6950s with 3 GHz quad core AMDs instead. One of the big limitations with the 2950s is the lack of card slots. It does not give me the ability to run both dual HBAs and dual 4 Port NICs thus creating a single point of failure riding on one PCI-E card. Thanks again.