Any BladeCenter S people out there? need help

[kfkehua]

It would be great if any of you have experience with with Bladecenter S can share your comments, really appreciated:

1. Is booting from the storage module a good practice? is it reliable?

2. We have 1 storage module for VMware and 1 storage module for other stuff. For the module for VMware with 6 drives, I'm thining about making it a raid 5 with all 6 drives. is that a good idea, any performance concerns with a raid 5 with 6 disks?

3. When deploying Exchange server. Is it better to make 1 virtual disk and then do seperate partiotions in windows, or rather make multiple virtual disks and present them to windows as seperate disks? or no difference?

4. How's the overall performance of a bladecenter S + Vmware?? Anything I should watch out??

Thanks very much.

KF

[crnielsen]

Hi

I am using BladeCenter S. I have these comments for you.

1. I am using the XM blades with builtin ESXi, so I don't boot from the shared storage. I don't think stability is top class, but it is ok. We have had 2 crashes this year, but I think the most recent firmware upgrade improved that

2. I am running RAID 5 on 5 disks and 1 hotspare.

3. We don't use Exchange, but I always use seperate VMDKs for the different partitions. That's is the most logical, and easiest to expand if nessacery.

4. Overall performance is ok, for our usage

Hope that answers some of your questions

Regards

Claus