UNISYS ES7000 for vSphere 4

[jameszhu]

For vSphere 4 implementation, we bought a lot of UNISYS ES7000, which include 4 processors, each has 6 core, 24 cpu in total, a lot of memory, and PCI slots in one cell.

My questions are:

Does anybody have experiences on ES7000? Can you introduce your thoughts or designs on your architecture? or best practice, etc.?

Should we install ESX 4 on one cell to build up an ESX host, or should we build up a system which includes two cells or even more, such as 3, or 4 cells for an ESX host? Did you see any advantages to run ESX 4 with muti-cell system?

I do appreciate your help,

[jameszhu]

I have never seen a ESX host with so high performance like a UNISYS ES7000 partition, which is combined with two cells, 48 physical CPU in total.

we built 8 VMs with windows 2003 installed, each is configured with 8 vCPU.

We found we were still able to run an application like IE with satisfied response time after we ran 8 CPU bound programs to bury all 8 configured vCPU on each VM. ready time was low too.

JamesZhu