Category Archives: VMware

Blade Server Options for VMware vSAN ReadyNode

Last July I wrote a blog article showcasing the limited options listed on VMware’s vSAN ReadyNode listing.  Over the past 14 months, that list has grown so instead of updating that older post, I thought I’d provide a consolidated updated list of vSAN ReadyNode blade servers.

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Cisco Blade Servers Enter vSAN Market

Last month, VMware announced a new vSAN Ready Node using the Cisco UCS B-Series blade server.  Blade servers aren’t new to vSAN Ready Nodes (see “VMware Virtual SAN Ready Node on a Blade Server“) and Cisco isn’t new to the vSAN business – they’ve had their UCS C-Series rack servers certified since “Ready Nodes” were announced, so why is this announcement interesting?  It’s because it is the first vSAN node that only includes 2 drives. Continue reading

Vblocks Will Continue to Use UCS

As the new year kicks off, Dell EMC leadership has made it clear that the partnership with Cisco is as strong as always.  Cisco’s UCS is the compute layer of the Dell EMC Vblock so many wondered if there would be a “Dblock” or something similar using the PowerEdge blade server product from the former VCE group and the answer is an astounding “NO!”  (In case you missed it, check out Chad Sakac‘s blog post, “Vblock and VxBlock Use Cisco UCS.  Got it?“)   Continue reading

Workload Acceleration Options for Blade Servers

I recently was asked what the demand for NVMe drives was, so I pinged my peers to see where they are seeing the adoption of NVMe (in rack or blade servers forms) and got a pretty interesting response.  This got me wondering what the options were for NVMe, as well as other acceleration technologies, in the blade server world.  Here is what I found.

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VMware Virtual SAN Ready Node on a Blade Server

UPDATED I recently had to determine the best option for a customer from the Virtual SAN Compatibility Guide / Virtual SAN Ready Node guide and was a bit surprised to see only a single blade server vendor listed.  When it comes to choosing a server form factor, there are many reasons to choose blade servers, and several reasons not to choose them (see “5 Reasons You May NOT Want a Blade Server – April 2013.”)  If you think blade servers will fit for your infrastructure needs, here are a few options to consider.

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New Study Shows Dell Blades Outperform Cisco UCS

A newly published study by Principled Technologies reports in tests that the Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade environment delivered up to 91.7% greater throughput while running a virtualized OLTP database workload compared to a similarly priced Cisco UCS 5108 blade environment.  In addition they found that the Dell environment delivered consistent scaling as blade servers were added versus the performance degradation observed in the Cisco environment.

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Dell vs Cisco – New Tolly Report (updated)

UPDATED – Tolly Enterprises recently published a new Tolly Report comparing Dell PowerEdge FX2 with Cisco UCS showing results favoring Dell.  The 17 page document provides background on each of the product architectures and tests them in four test cases.  Continue reading

Why Dell’s PowerEdge VRTX is Ideal for Virtualization

I recently had a customer looking for 32 Ethernet ports on a 4 server system to drive a virtualization platform.  At 8 x 1GbE per compute node, this was a typical VMware virtualization platform (they had not moved to 10GbE yet) but it’s not an easy task to perform on blade servers – however the Dell PowerEdge VRTX is an ideal platform, especially for remote locations. Continue reading

Dell’s PowerEdge VRTX Gets An Upgrade

The past few months have seen some long awaited new additions to Dell’s PowerEdge VRTX system.  In an effort to prevent this from being an “all Dell” blog, I’ve held off writing about these new additions until today.  In a quick summary, the new additions include: 2nd PERC, added support for VMware ESXi 5.5, added support for the M820 blade server and the ability to repurpose blade servers from the M1000e.  Let’s dig into each of these.

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Intel E5 2600 v2 vSphere Compatibility

One of the first questions I’ve received when I started discussing the new Intel E5 2600 v2 CPU is “will it work with my existing blade server VMware clusters?”  The sales answer is YES, of course.  The real answer is, it depends. 

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