Bladewatch.com

I was having a chat with one of my friends who has recently started as a Project Manager for one of the funds companies in West London. Anyway he called me up, he has to organize and prioritize virtualization of servers and asked me three key questions:

1. What is 1GB ready? By that he meant which servers already have a network card capable of 1GB?
2. How can I tell how old a server is?
3. Where can I get an overview of the server specs?

What vendor I asked and was told Compaq/HP, they were upgrading and virtualizing their servers onto a nice new environment as part of a consolidation and data center migration exercise. His issue, he has 237 servers to look at and the project is in three phases:

1. Move all servers on to the new network (except those judge too old to be moved, they should be virtualized)
2. Consolidate infrastructure and application services where possible
3. Virtualize the non production application and where possible production infrastructure servers

So his key requirements for phase one:

• Servers that are 1GB capable without a lot of work
• Anything that might go bang when they touched it

My reply, and it was rather vague, anything pre-G3 (except the DL580 G2) is likely to have an integrated or separate PCI network card rated at 10MB/100MB and will need a separate network card fitted. I pointed him at the HP quickspecs sites and emailed him the spreadsheet that we’ve got published for all to download which states averaged age of Compaq/HP servers.

With this in mind, to make life a bit easier, I have summarized a few of the Compaq/HP servers that we have used and tested over the years here at Bladewatch. The summary contains an overview, the what it has, how big it is and the key parts that we have tested in it for improving performance or management.

I’ve done the DL380 G1 and the DL380 G2 so far and will add more shortly. I’ll do the DL360 / DL380 / DL580 /DL760, and then move on to the Dell and IBM equivalents. Do please check the specifications with the original HP quickspecs as they are the official reference guide or contact your service provider/HP direct.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.