Vmware on blades is bad

January 18th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid94_gci1239548,00.html

Blade server market leaders IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co. are both pouring resources in to developing their wares. Most recently, IBM added 10 GigE to its BladeCenter H platform. But, so far, these efforts haven’t been enough to convince Rod Lucero, CTO of the Minnesotan VMware consultancy VMPowered, to recommend blade servers to customers undertaking large-scale virtualization and consolidation projects.

An interesting article, my viewpoint though would be fine, but local disks on blades? Isn’t that rather efficient, we’ve had problems with the disks failing on the blades, and besides the power required and heat generated from those disks is adding extra load to the datacenter.  Sure SAN booting can be complicated and needs to be done properly, but when it’s configured correctly, the results energy wise and thermally can be significant.  Think, 500 blades, no local disks and booting of SAN.

Network port wise, again blades are limited in that respect, but the volume you can get say 16 blades in a similar footprint (space wise) to a few DL580G2’s, is worth it, you’ll get 96 cpus, instead of 12, or 16, and they will be more easily replaceable/ugpradeable if SAN boot is enabled.  The blades may be power hungry, but they are manageable, and the ultra low voltage ones might be a way around this.

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