Tag Archives: vSAN

What You May Not Know About PowerEdge VRTX

We just learned this week that the PowerEdge VRTX, which was announced in June of 2013, will remain in the Dell EMC portfolio into 2021.  This is great news for customers who have invested into the “datacenter in a box” platform and opens up an opportunity for those who aren’t using it.  It’s been a while since I’ve talked about the PowerEdge VRTX platform, so here are a few things you may not know. Continue reading

UCS vs PowerEdge MX – Comparison of Admin Tasks

Principled Technologies released a report earlier this month that compared certain administrative tasks between a Cisco UCS blade server solution and a Dell EMC PowerEdge MX solution and the results were quite surprising. Continue reading

What Workloads Are Running on Your Blade Servers?

Higher CPU core counts and faster memory speeds are expanding the use case for blade servers.  In years past, a majority of users would say they use blade servers for a dense platform for virtualization.  Today, I think there are more workloads than virtualization running on blade servers, but I need your help to decide if my speculation is true.  Continue reading

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

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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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.

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