Comments for Blades Made Simple

Comment on 4 Socket Blade Servers Density: Vendor Comparison by mike

mike — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:07:31 +0000

Nik,
Dell 4S blades (others have a bit more limitations in redundancy, but can support pretty large IO expansion) have the capability to support 2 pairs of mezz cards (e.g. 2 x 2 port 10Gb + 2 x 2 port FC or 4 x 2 port 10Gb) in addition to 2 pairs of dual port 1Gb. So lots of IO capability and full redundancy.

Comment on 4 Socket Blade Servers Density: Vendor Comparison by mike

mike — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:01:52 +0000

you make a great point that absolutely needs to be looked at in more detail. we published a paper with Intel on how a plain old 10Gb controller using standard VMWare tools is ideal for LAN consolidation and even LAN/SAN consolidation with iSCSI. And you dont need a Flex10 or IBM VFA to do it, VMWare has all the QoS/rate limiting (if you need it – most environments dont even need that level of complexity today) and vLAN capabilities already so you can keep it simple. that paper is posted here:
http://download.intel.com/support/network/sb/10...
brad hedlund from Cisco in his blog posted a similar view but naturally advocated use of Nexus 5K/1K QoS features to achieve a similar goal.
to your point though, EX does enable much higher levels of consolidation, so our next project will be to explore that scenario in more detail.

Comment on 4 Socket Blade Servers Density: Vendor Comparison by Nik Simpson

Nik Simpson — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:48:53 +0000

RAM is important, but so is enough redundant I/O bandwidth, and that's often where 4-socket blades fall short.

Comment on 4 Socket Blade Servers Density: Vendor Comparison by David Watts

David Watts — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:38:27 +0000

Good comparison Kevin. The next step would be to compare memory DIMM count as well as CPU count, since the key to really using a 4-socket system is to have sufficient RAM.

Comment on 4 Socket Blade Servers Density: Vendor Comparison by Kevin Houston

Kevin Houston — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:20:32 +0000

I'd love to learn more about #dell 's upcoming Nehalem EX innovation. Reach out to me – you can find my contact information on the site, or Direct Message me on Twitter (@Kevin_Houston). Thanks for reading!

Comment on 4 Socket Blade Servers Density: Vendor Comparison by Kevin Houston

Kevin Houston — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:18:28 +0000

You mention NIC bottlenecking due to the movement from 10-15 active VMs to 50-70 active VMs per blade – for both server to server communications and our iSCSI SAN. Are you using 10Gb Ethernet connections from the Dell blades to the network? I'm always interested in learning about real usages of the blade servers. Thanks for reading!

Comment on 4 Socket Blade Servers Density: Vendor Comparison by Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:13:00 +0000

We are a major blade shop with about 20 chassis.

We have pre-production M910s in house under evaluation at this time. ( I will not steal Dell's thunder on what they look like.) We have loaded Oracle, VMware, Linux, Windows and are testing various applications. So far, so good. We are in the process of our next round of capacity expansion and expect to replace all of our production systems with the EX line.

Here is my take on EX. It will address 512 to 1024 GB of RAM, so the primary focus of the EX will be to increase density in existing deployments or in new consolidation efforts while giving databases more cache.

For us, we will be able to increase our density of VMs or databases five-fold over the current 96GB RAM half-height system - with the impact being felt in our dev/test environments. In production, we will be able to deal with increased workloads by consolidating hoggy apps onto VMs from standalone systems and increasing the cache on our Oracle databases.

The limit we will run into will be NIC bottlenecking due to the movement from 10-15 active VMs to 50-70 active VMs per blade - for both server to server communications and our iSCSI SAN. We are not sure where the sweet spot is - we expect this will be a bigger impact in production under load than our other environments. We plan to test this once we get our hands on a production M910.

Dell and others will have to move towards the next step on network bandwidth at some point.

Comment on 4 Socket Blade Servers Density: Vendor Comparison by mike

mike — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:13:56 +0000

Hi kevin (i work at dell) and enjoy reading your blog. We dont talk about our innovation enough in the press, real innovation that helps customers. i'd be happy to talk to you about it if you want. our EX launch is going to be a big proof point of this and it will really contrast our approach to solving real world customer problems in a much more practical way than (for example) IBM's approach. there are many other examples of shipping today in our blades. take care..

Comment on 4 Socket Blade Servers Density: Vendor Comparison by Kevin Houston

Kevin Houston — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:49:57 +0000

#dell and “innovation” have not been used together in many sentences over the past few years, so I look forward to seeing what they have in store. Thanks for the comment!

Comment on Virtual I/O on IBM BladeCenter (IBM Virtual Fabric Adapter by Emulex) by jmetz

jmetz — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:26:08 +0000

Mark, I didn't say HP did iSCSI offload on Flex-10. I said HP does iSCSI hardware offload using QLogic's QMH4062 which is compatible with Virtual Connect Flex-10 technology.