Aaron Delp’s BladeVault

Sorry I haven’t posted the last few weeks. What can I say; I’m easily distracted by shiny objects. I made a switch from the Palm Treo 650 over to the HTC 6800 recently. This cool little geek toy has consumed my time for the last few weeks while I figure out everything about it. I have been loading programs and tweaking to my hearts content. My only advice to anyone considering this, the extended battery is a must!! Fun, Fun…

Anybody else have a Windows Smart Phone? I’d love to hear your tricks, tips, and must have applications that you are using.

Things should be returning to normal over the next few days.

I’ve been following all the press regarding IBM’s new Multi-Node 3950 M2. The machine looks great and the ability to scale from one 4 socket box to multiple boxes (2 at this time) is simply awesome. You simply can’t match that kind of raw horse power.

But then I got to thinking… At what point is it too much? Let’s just talk about ESX for a second, I know the box has other applications but I want to focus on ESX. A single 3950 M2 offers a maximum of 16 cores (4 socket x 4 cores) plus up to 128GB of memory (256 GB when the 8GB DIMMS are released). Double that in a two node configuration and you get 32 cores and 512 GB.

ESX 3.5 currently supports 32 cores (64 core is experimental) and 256GB max. I could see an extreme situation where 32 cores with 256 GB (using the cheaper 4GB DIMMs) might be feasible if your workload is CPU bound. Yes, I know if you compare the underlying chipsets the IBM X4 chipset screams compared to anything else. It will blow the doors off most blades (no matter who makes them) for pumping raw data through the pipes. The problem at the end of the day is money. It is getting increasingly more difficult to justify the high end servers on a price vs performance comparison. The 3950 M2 performs better, but at what cost? Also, with VMWare HA and DRS features, the scale “out” (using more, smaller boxes) has become more appealing than the scale “up” (using less, larger boxes) for distributing workloads across machines while maintaining overhead for a machine failure.

Increasingly in Information Technology, it is becoming a “Wal-mart” world. Often times, good enough will do. What do you think?

(Thanks to Scott Lowe and Matt Portnoy for keeping me honest on the max values for ESX!)

This article over at the Server Virtualization Blog got me thinking… Are Blades the next “Pizza Box” servers for ESX? By that I mean are Blades reaching the mainstream to the point that they are becoming a commodity? In my role as a pre-sales Engineer, I speak to many customers and you can predict what many of them want to talk about before we walk in the door, Blades and ESX.

Yes, we still move pizza boxes and many customers (usually the price sensitive ones) still love them. Now that the blade market has matured, we are seeing less and less of the pizza box attitude.

Let’s take that a step further, what are they buying? Some decide to go with the smaller form factor blades (IBM HS21 and HP BL460c) but a surprising number are going for the larger HP BL680c. The BL680c Blade is a four socket Intel Blade with a maximum of 128 GB of memory and plenty of expansion ports, especially using the quad port Ethernet expansion (remember to use the right model quad port card for ESX!!) For me, the small blade vs large blade decision always ends in the “it depends” answer.

You’ll notice I didn’t throw out an IBM 4 socket model. Not to throw IBM to far under the bus on this one but LS41 product just isn’t appealing to most customers right now. That is a discussion for another day.

What are you seeing? What are your thoughts?

vinternals has a great article on the current subtle differences between ESX 3i and full blown ESX. By “subtle”, I mean they will bite you in the butt as an Engineer if you believe the marketing people. This is the main reason I started the site. I want to get information out there to the technical masses that often leads to trouble if you haven’t run into it before (or somebody does and tells you!).

The Infiniband isn’t that big of a deal to me but the HA and Networking caveats are! I hope it helps!

Just a heads up for everyone, the new 31.4 GB Solid State “Disk” (43W7618) for the IBM Blade Servers is supported on the entire product line. The previous generations (16GB single and dual platter) were only supported in the HS21 XM.

Also, this model is a single platter, not a dual platter (think RAID 1 within the disk case) and as far as I know a dual platter isn’t in the works for now.

This is an update to my previous articles here and here on this issue.

I now have confirmation from HP that the supported OS’s for iSCSI Boot on the Blades are RHEL (versions 4 & 5) and SUSE (versions 9 & 10). There is no Microsoft or VMWare support at this time.