I Love VMware!
June 4th, 2008 @ 11:06 am
Over the Memorial Day holiday, I had a “VMware Upgrade Party.” I’m not sure it was really a “Party” since I was the lone attendee, but I’ll call it one anyway. 
I got all of our ESX servers upgraded to the latest build of 3.5, as well as Virtualcenter to the latest 2.5 build. I also added our fourth ESX server, which is the diskless, boot from SAN box I talked about a couple of weeks ago.
I was a little bit hesitant to put the diskless box in production since a bug in the QLogic HBA firmware required me to run their beta or “Limited Release” firmware in order to do Jumbo Frames. So far though, it has been rock solid.
Below, you can see our current VMware environment. I get more and more excited about this every day. I can now have a new machine online in less than 20 minutes without adding any physical hardware. Awesome! We currently have one stand-alone ESX server, jfbc-ecc-esx03 that runs our virtual desktops. The other three servers are in an HA cluster sporting a total of 32GHz of CPU resources and 52GB of RAM. I like it! I hope to be able to add Vmotion and Distributed Resource Scheduling later this year so we can more effectively manage our host resources.
What type of hardware you running? We are trying to make a section between having 2 x Dell R900 (16core each) or 3/4 x Dell 2950 III (8 core each). 2 big or 3/4 mid server.
Comment by Rif Kiamil — June 4, 2008 @ 2:52 pm
We are using HP DL360 G5 servers. We have a couple of them with dual quad core processors (8 cores per box) and a couple with dual core processors. They have anywhere from 16-20GB of RAM each depending on when they were purchased.
I would chose multiple smaller machines over 1 big one. Since VMware is licensed per CPU socket, it really doesn’t matter how many physical machines you have, and you can usually gain a little redundancy and save some cash by using multiple dual-socket servers vs quad-socket machines.
Comment by Derek — June 4, 2008 @ 3:10 pm