VMworld.com: How are you using your Blades? ...

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10 Replies Last post: Sep 24, 2007 6:17 PM by surovich

Brent Hughes

6 posts since
Sep 10, 2007

Sep 17, 2007 11:36 AM

How are you using your Blades?

We are going to HP Blades and I am curious what others are running on there Blades regardless of vendor. Are you running them in both your primary datacenter and your DR site? Are you running VMWare on them? Are you running Citrix on them? How has overall performance been (especially network) and what would you do differently if anything?

housecs

2 posts since
Sep 10, 2007

1. Sep 17, 2007 6:02 PM

in response to: Brent Hughes

Re: How are you using your Blades?

We have around 60 HP c-class & p-class blades, very happy with them. Performance no different than a regular server - our blades are more powerful than our regular rack-mount servers. We run ESX and Windows on our blades.

john.merritt

1 posts since
Sep 10, 2007

2. Sep 17, 2007 8:15 PM

in response to: Brent Hughes

Re: How are you using your Blades?

We have both the older HP P class and the c Class blades. We use them for everything (vmware, citrix, web, app, mssql, oracle, linux, windows, etc) performance is excellent. Power and cooling are the biggest issues with blades.

Brent Hughes

6 posts since
Sep 10, 2007

3. Sep 18, 2007 5:31 AM

in response to: john.merritt

Re: How are you using your Blades?

Thanks for responding guys! It is interesting that you mention power and cooling because I have heard this before. I thought Blades were supposed to save money because they used less power than rack mount servers and managed cooling better. Do they consume more power and are they harder to cool?

housecs

2 posts since
Sep 10, 2007

4. Sep 18, 2007 5:35 AM

in response to: Brent Hughes

Re: How are you using your Blades?

I don't know if they save money in terms of power and cooling but the main reason to use blades is they are smaller and you can pack more in a rack. They are regular servers though so they have the same power and cooling requirements. I wouldn't say that a rack full of blades runs hotter than a rack full of 2U rack-mount servers. They have done some very unique things to address cooling and we have never seen a problem.

Ken Cohen

13 posts since
Sep 18, 2007

5. Sep 18, 2007 8:47 AM

in response to: Brent Hughes

Re: How are you using your Blades?

We have a dozen HP BL480c blades in two enclosures. We have ESX 3.0.2 installed on each blade. The blades are a bit on the inflexible side for my preferences (e.g. we could have more NICs in each blade but we'd need more switches to accomodate them), but the hardware was purchased before I took this job.:-)

hazent

4 posts since
Sep 10, 2007

6. Sep 18, 2007 8:54 AM

in response to: Brent Hughes

Re: How are you using your Blades?

Were using about 65 c-class blades, all BL460 with dual quad core processors. Of those blades, 36 are citrix servers running 4 Gig RAM. 4 are ESX Hosts, dual quad core 32Gig RAM. The rest are a mix of different apps. Performance has been great, especially for VM and Citrix. We have 6 enclosures on 2 seperate campuses, one enclosure on each campus has SAN connectivity. As older hardware comes due for replacement, they are being replaced with blades unless there is a need for additional PCI slots (ie. fax/modem board, T1 card, etc...).

As a lessons learned, our first enclosure rack was a narrow rack and was very cramped after getting PDUs and network cabling into the rack. We used a wide rack for the second enclosure rack and cabling was much easier. As we add additional racks for enclosures, they will definately be the wider style rack.

jodonald

2 posts since
Sep 10, 2007

7. Sep 18, 2007 9:34 AM

in response to: Brent Hughes

Re: How are you using your Blades?

We are a small shop and currently only have 6 blades. I have found them to be a space saver. The biggest difference I have noticed with cooling and power is because I don't have local storage in them; everything is on the SAN.

Going forward, I am unsure if I will will purchase blades in the future. they do save space, but with 3i coming out, i can probably pack as many virtual servers onto fewer 2U servers than what I can currently put on my blades.

Jae Ellers

8 posts since
Sep 10, 2007

8. Sep 21, 2007 7:16 AM

in response to: jodonald

Re: How are you using your Blades?

3i won't make any difference in consolidation ratios. 3i will run fine on blades. There should be no difference in a 2u 4x quadcore box and a BL480c. 3i is for those who want a drop-in ESX solution.

Josh

5 posts since
Sep 22, 2007

9. Sep 24, 2007 12:11 PM

in response to: Jae Ellers

Re: How are you using your Blades?

We've installed a few c-Class blade chassis and we've selected BL460C dual-core servers with dual-proc, 2nd mezzanine NIC, and 10GB RAM. We have about 12 ESX 3.01 installations on blade and we've seen major performance improvement consolidating serves from old rack-mount (P3, P4, etc). We're seeing about 8 - 10:1 vm to physical ratio. Regarding power/cooling, the thing to watch out for is the Watt/BTU use of the chassis in the event of a power supply failure. When this happens, the power supplies may rev up, but I think their most recent firmware update addresses many power issues.

We've found that a typical c-Class chassis uses about 800W w/ passthru interconnects, with about a 200W overhead per blade. A thing to consider are your interconnects, as this can draw more power depending on your implementation. The best thing is once you install a chassis, you've pretty much pre-installed 16 potential servers. That's huge for a small IT shop. We used VC and VMWare Converter to P2V our old servers and we have a nice VM deployment now.

surovich

1 posts since
Sep 10, 2007

10. Sep 24, 2007 6:17 PM

in response to: Brent Hughes

Re: How are you using your Blades?

We have about 600 blades deployed in the US and they are so good they are the standard when hardware is needed (We of course VM most things). We use them for Citrix, SQL, and VMware - but the Vmware is mostly for stand alone VM hosts, which is usually an all in one DEV server. We use 585's for SAN attached VM hosts.

We just installed about 30 c-class blades and the performance is awesome - We do see our next Cluster for VMware going to the quad core blades and maybe the blade storage system for the VMFS partition...

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Sep 17, 2007 11:36 AM

How are you using your Blades?

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