Best Server Model for Virtualization - R900, R905

As virtualization become the hottest topic for IT nows day, more and more servers had been built by the vendor to succeed the market demand to virtualize the customer production environment. It always come to a point that the Vendor claim thier servers are the best for virtualization. But in real scenerio, as a customer, we will have to spend time to figure out the cost and effective solution for our virtualization

Couples of important point that need to be consider during the implementation of Virtualization is :

1. Hardware compatibility
2. Storage choices
3. networking equipment
4. System architecture
5. Support and operation maintenance
6. CPU model and brand ( AMD or Intel )

This topic I will be more specify to the server model for virtualization. In couple of test and real case experience, I do compare the cost, performance, services and reliability within IBM, HP and DELL before I decide to move forward with my final decision.

DELL had recently launched the R900 and R905 this year specifically to support for 4 physical CPU sockets which able to host up to 16 cores of CPU with the latest quad core technology from both Intel and AMD which allow the memory to scale up to 256GB of physical memory if you go for the 8GB/module in DIMM slot. 1 interesting you may need to look at the servers is the on board 10Gbps capable network ports. The server itself had come with 4 on board NICs with capable to run the next generation ethernet 10Gbps. As network bandwidth become a big challenge after the virtualization, this connection will provide better cabling management and of course higher throughput once the 10GbE in place. The additional PCI slot on the 4U servers do provide flexibility to add-on fiber channel HBA or additional Ethernet card to provide redundancy and fail over path for HA purpose.

I will also suggest to stick with 128GB memory instead of 256GB as you may experience CPU bottleneck once you have the higher number of VM running on the production ESX. Guess what, a lot of the consultant will always encourage we configure 1 Vcpu or 2 Vcpu as starting for each VM we created. But in real case, we will have to make it to 4Vcpu or 8Vcpu in the future, that will due to the business grow and data processing increase from time to time. If we virtualize the servers and sacrifice performance, that will not become a big selling point for virtualization. As you may need to re-think, the storage for VM is mostly running on SAN or ISCSI, which may be more expensive solution compare to local HDD.

4 physical CPUs and 128GB memory is the best option at this moment as if you plan for HA or DRS in your environment, as a safe play to minimize the down time, I will not encourage to host a huge number of VM on 1 single hosts. You may need to consider if you have 40 VMs on 1 single host, the hardware failure on 1 host will bring down the 40 VMs which is in production.

For warranty and services, DELL always commit better services to my company with a more reasonable and affordable pricing. you may enjoy the same benefit from HP but you require to pay more in that case. For IBM, I will say x86 platform servers are just not their focus, as they always slow respond on bug fix release on their firmware or driver on x86 platform.