Blizzard Entertainment recently announced they are auctioning off some older HP blade servers that previously hosted the popular World of Warcraft (WoW) game with 100% of the proceeds going to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital®. While it is great to own a piece of WoW history, keep in mind, these servers won’t do you any good for [...]
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 [...]
In 1965, Gordon Moore predicted that engineers would be able to double the number of components on a microchip every two years. Known as Moore’s law, his prediction has come true – processors are continuing to become faster each year while the components are becoming smaller and smaller. In the footprint of the original ENIAC [...]
If you are a reader of BladesMadeSimple, you are no stranger to Dell’s Network Daughter Card (NDC), but if it is a new term for you, let me give you the basics. Up until now, blade servers came with network interface cards (NICs) pre-installed as part of the motherboard. Most servers came standard with Dual-port [...]
I’ve learned over the years that it is very easy to focus on the feeds and speeds of a server while overlooking features that truly differentiate. When you take a look under the covers, a server’s CPU and memory are going to be equal to the competition, so the innovation that goes into the server [...]
People are always asking me: “how many blades I have to put in a chassis to make it worth?” My answer is always: “It depends!” . There is no magical number.
Since my last post, I heard lots of rumors that VMware would make some changes in their new licensing model. Well, this week VMware made an official announcement of changes and posted here. VMware made very clear that all the changes were motivated by the feedbacks they have received:
I was recently on one of those calls from HP “checking in”. If you are an HP customer you may know these calls start off with something like “We know you spent money on HP last quarter so how many people from this company will have to pester you until you buy more stuff from us?” One of the [...]
One of the biggest challenges related to blade servers in an existing data center is how to power and cool. APC wrote a white paper (link below) that explains how to asses the options to best power and cool your blade environment.
As you no doubt heard by now, VMware has announced a new version of vSphere along with some new or improved features however, this post will not highlight these features. In this post, I want to talk about what did not improve – the licensing.