Tag Archives: VMware

Looking for vSAN Ready Nodes that Run vSAN 8 – Your Choices Are Limited

Now that VMware has released vSphere 8.0, I thought it would be interesting to gather up all of the blade servers that are certified as “vSphere Ready Nodes.”  The results were quite shocking. Continue reading

What Blade Servers Are Certified as VMware vSAN Ready Nodes?

In this day and age, 99% of datacenter environments are virtualized, however a fraction of those environments are using virtualized storage, aka “vSAN”.  I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the full 1000+ page list of VMware vSAN Ready Nodes and deduct all non blade server systems.  In this post, I’ll be highlighting only blade server vSAN Ready Nodes. Continue reading

New iDRAC License Adds New Features Like Telemetry Streaming To Your Blade Servers

One very important consideration for choosing your blade server is the type of embedded management license you need.  I’ve seen organizations attempt to save money by going with the low end license offering for systems management only to find out it doesn’t include a crucial feature.  One such feature is the ability to see trends and get early warnings from a server before it alerts.  In this blog post I’m going to talk about the iDRAC license options for Dell EMC blade servers including a comparison of the different license versions and why you may want them.

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Dell EMC Launches Something New, But Don’t Refer to It as AI

Earlier this month Dell EMC unveiled their newest solution of products that combines all of their core products into one system known as PowerOne.  This new system will be fully-engineered and highly-automated with autonomous operations and flexible consumption options and is being positioned as “Autonomous Infrastructure” – but don’t call it AI.  If you haven’t heard of Autonomous Infrastructure before, it’s because it’s a new category for products that are beyond Converged Infrastructure. The Dell EMC PowerOne combines PowerEdge MX blade servers with PowerMax storage and connects it via Dell EMC Networking while protecting it with Dell EMC Data Protection.  I’ll go more into the components at the end of this post, but first I want to focus on what makes PowerOne unique – the automation. Continue reading

Why Blade Servers Could Be the Future of the Datacenter

One of my tasks as Chief Technology Architect at Dell is to talk with customers about future technologies.  When I reflect on my past vision of where the blade server is heading (“The Blade Server of the Future“) I’m surprised at how close we are to that vision becoming a reality.  Based upon where we are heading, the blade server format could be the perfect model for the future datacenter, so let me explain why. Continue reading

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

Managing Server Hardware and VMs – You Need This Tool

If your organization has teams that are responsible for managing both the physical server hardware (rack or blade server) lifecycle and the virtual environment, there is a tool that is ideal for you.  Continue reading

This Server Technology Is a Game Changer so You Better Be Ready

As I’m talking with customers about rack or blade servers, I always start with industry trends.  I make sure they understand the things to be aware of with Intel Xeon SP processors, what’s new with AMD EPYC processors, NVMe drives and I wrap it up discussing Storage Class Memory  If you aren’t familiar with Storage Class Memory, you better start learning about it, because it is a game changer. Continue reading