IBM X460 X3950 implement experience

[choming_tsai]

Hi,

I have a customer wants to implement ESX3 on IBM X460 (8CPU) and X3950(4 CPU), I heard that there are some critical setting for these kind of H/W or the performance would be no good, could someone ever have implemented such H/W share your experience. Any special setting that need to be noticed? We will install the ESX on the local disks and implement the VM on the SAN. Several DB will migrate to the ESX, so any hints to improve the performance of DB on ESX? Appreciate any reply.

[foofighter26]

Hi,

This might be useful:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/sg247190.html?Open

[Rob_Bohmann1]

We have some 3950's (some single, some dual core). It is rather straightforward if you are using a san, separate your nics and hba's on different buses, make sure your bios/firmware is at the latest rev, etc, all the usual things you would do to maximize performance on a host.

[choming_tsai]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for your reply, My customer ever inplemented VI3 on his X460. And he told me the SAS disk (install both ESX and VM) provided a poor performance to virtual machine. So I recommend he use HBA and SAN to improve VM performance. Could you share your environment, and any user feedback regarding to X460, X2950? Any comments ? Thanks

[caciolli]

x460 and now x3950 (and his little brother , but not so little, x3850) are my favourites boxes for implementing VI3.

I have a lot of customers that have these kind of servers and X3 rocks!

All my projects involves a SAN (IBM and EMC) and local storage (SAS) is only for ESX3.

Remember to keep up to date all firmware, Bios, BMC, SAS Drives, RAID 8i, CPLD, networking, RSA. Use the more memory expander cards as you can to achieve best performance with memory.

No other settings are needed to make this working.

[StefanPeer · Accepted solution]

We're using 3 X460 boxes with 4 CPUs (8 cores) and 32GB RAM each, IBM SAN storage for VMFS and internal SAS for ESX OS.

We had performance issues with a busy Oracle database, but all other VMs are running just fine - after all, it's 90 VMs on 3 ESX hosts.

Installation is straight forward, unplug SAN, insert CD, install ESX, configure networks, plug in SAN, configure LUNs and you have one more ESX server up and running.

Be sure to have the latest Update xPress and BIOS installed, they include some vital fixes.

[JonT]

I have one x3950 host and the VM performance is great. My only issue is that networking seems to perform a bit slower than other manufacturers equivalent hardware does. I have tried with the onboard and a PCI-e NIC and both seem to perform just average (~600Mbits/s throughput on GigE). I personally favor the HS21 blade over the IBM rackmount but hate the memory limitations of blades.

[Rob_Bohmann1]

Hi choming,

We do not use local storage -- these boxes are too big to use local!

We use the expansion chassis (and I dislike those cables!) so we have 2 chassis combined.

Our storage is a netapp 3020 with 2 heads, luns evenly distribruted over both heads. We use this for our PLD (Production Level Development) environments. They connect thru Cisco 6509 access switches to a 6513 Core, and then to the interfaces on the netapp. These networks are dedicated to storage, currently only iscsi traffic on them. We have 2 connections per host, use software initiators (so only 1 connection is active) and we are both surprised and impressed with the performance so far.

While this is a development environment and probably more than 50% of the servers on any given day are not doing much if any work, we have scaled these hosts up to 80 vm's at times over a single connection. We plan on scaling for capacity planning measures around 70 for failover / redundancy purposes. You will most likely run out of memory before you run ought of cpu on these boxes.

I definitely agree they should use shared storage if they are going to use a box this big as a VM host. While we are a netapp shop, they are many options for san/iscsi out there. Find out what their storage capacity needs are and then the i/0 requirements of the individual servers they plan to run on this box. Then you can determine if they should use a SAN or ISCSI.