No, this isn’t click bait. You could possibly upgrade your blade servers and it could actually end up saving you money (and theoretically be free.) Let me explain. Continue reading
Tag 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.
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
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.
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
A Closer Look at the Dell FD332 for FX Architecture
[updated 4.13.15] Today Dell officially started shipping the FC430 and the FD332 Storage blocks for the Dell FX Architecture. The FC430 is a slick, server offering for many workloads, but many questions pop up around what the FD332 is and how it can be used, so in today’s post I’m hoping to clarify it for you.
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
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.
How VMware’s Announcements Will Impact Blade Servers
As we near the end of VMworld, I thought I would take some time to highlight a couple of announcements that could impact the way people use blade servers with VMware vSphere.
HP Flex 10 vs VMware vSphere Network I/O Control for VDI
I once was a huge fan of HP’s Virtual Connect Flex-10 10Gb Ethernet Modules but with the new enhancements to VMware vSphere 5, I don’t think I would recommend for virtual environments anymore. The ability to divide the two onboard network cards up to 8 NICS was a great feature and still is, if you have to do physical deployments of servers. I do realize that there is the HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric 10Gb/24-port Module but I live in the land of iSCSI and NFS so that is off the table for me.
With vSphere 5.0, VMware improved on its Continue reading