Are Blades the Next “Pizza Box” ESX Servers?
Posted by: Aaron Delp in HP Blades, IBM Blades, VMWareThis 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?
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We’re using HP BL465c’s here. I would prefer the full-height BL685c just because I believe it has more memory slots. We have 16GB of memory in each of our ESX hosts, but we really should have 32GB to maximize the CPU power we have. But 4GB DIMMs are just too pricey still. With the BL685c we can still use the 2GB DIMMs but get 32GB in there. Of course, then we’ll have four CPUs and quad-core instead of our current dual-core, so we may want 64GB of memory then.
In the end, the main reason I wanted bigger servers was to have fewer of them to manage, and that may be another reason why the BL68x series is so popular too.
Allen, I agree with you on all accounts. The problem right now is most of the time our customers’ VMWare boxes are memory constrained. If the memory was just a little cheaper, we could really give them what they want. If only we had blades with more memory slots… (more on that to come in the future)
Before ESX 3.5, I would agree with you. VMware has made great improvements when it comes to sharing the memory. What we’ve been seeing is the CPU is pegged long before the memory is even an issue.
I’m pro blades all the way but the one thing that really bothers me is the lack of IO options currently available. I mean we just saw the release of the Qlogic iSCSI HBA for the HP blades back in July. If that were a couple of months earlier, decisions would have been much easier. We wound up designing an environment with DL380s. Don’t get me wrong, the DL380 is the work horse of the HP family and does remarkably well as an ESX host. You have dual quad core CPUs, 32GB of RAM (64 of you go to 8GB DIMMS) and up to 5 PCIe slots. (If you can do boot from SAN or ESX 3i on the USB)
The only reason I would choose the full height blades is because of IO. In the class of server we’re talking about, it doesn’t really make much sense to go quad CPU. You run the risk of saturating the PCI bus before you get to the point where you will need the extra CPU cycles. Even if you don’t saturate the bus, the costs of the extra ESX licenses don’t seem to be worth it. Dual quad core systems are a good balance between price and performance. BL460 blades with a quad port NIC and a dual port iSCSI or FC HBA are a good config for a number of environments.