Category Archives: Dell – Dell EMC

Details of Network Partitioning on Dell PowerEdge Blade Servers

Network interface card partitioning (NPAR) allows users to minimize the implementation of physical Network interface cards (NICs) and separates Local Area Network (LAN) and Storage Area Network (SAN) connections. NPAR improves bandwidth allocation, network traffic management, and utilization in virtualized and non-virtualized network environments. The number of physical servers may be fewer, but the demand for the NIC ports is more.  This blog describes how to validate, enable, and configure NPAR on a Dell PowerEdge MX Platform through the server System Setup and the MX compute sled Server Templates within Dell Open Manage Enterprise – Modular (OME-M).  Read the full blog here.

Backing Up the Dell PowerEdge MX7000 Settings and Configurations

As anyone knows, having a functional backup (and recovery) plan for your datacenter is vital to insuring data protection.  While data protection of servers is a basic need, what about the infrastructure that supports it?  In the blade server world, the infrastructure is the chassis, management and switches.  In this post, I’ll discuss best practices for backing up the settings and configurations of the Dell PowerEdge MX7000 infrastructure. Continue reading →

Looking for vSAN Ready Nodes that Run vSAN 8 – Your Choices Are Limited

Now that VMware has released vSphere 8.0, I thought it would be interesting to gather up all of the blade servers that are certified as “vSphere Ready Nodes.”  The results were quite shocking. Continue reading →

An Updated Way to Get GPUs on Dell PowerEdge MX7000

It should be no surprise that the popularity of accelerators in the datacenter continues to grow.  In years past, I’ve written a few blog posts on the GPU options for blade servers, but at that time, the options were limited to either small GPUs like the NVIDIA T4 or mezzanine based GPUs.  Now the solutions that are available really open up some great options of using GPUs on blade servers.  Dell Technologies and Liqid have worked together to provide a way to provide multiple GPUs to blade servers using concepts that we won’t see in the market for another few years, so take a few minutes to learn more. Continue reading →

Can You Run GPUs on Blade Servers?

In the past, a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) was equated to a workload that was designing something, like building automobiles.  However, over the past few years, organizations have realized that GPUs have more value than utilization in Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML).  In fact, a large majority of recent GPU adoption revolved around utilization of GPUs with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).   As we look at a “modular infrastructure” (aka blade server) environments, having multiple servers within a small footprint is ideal for VDI.  In today’s blog post, I’m going to review what each blade server vendor offers for GPU options. Continue reading →

A Tour of Dell’s Power Calculator (EIPT)

 

Kevin Houston is the founder of BladesMadeSimple.com.  With over 24 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace Kevin has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware virtualization.  He has worked at Dell Technologies since August 2011 and is a Principal Engineer supporting the East Enterprise Region and is also a CTO Ambassador for the Office of the CTO at Dell Technologies.   #IWork4Dell

 

Disclaimer: The views presented in this blog are personal views and may or may not reflect any of the contributors’ employer’s positions. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any employer. No compensation has been provided for any part of this blog.