VM-Net

HP yesterday announced 11 new additions to their ProLiant server platform including new rack, tower and blade models. Timed to coincide with Intels “Nehalem EP” Xeon 5500 processor launch these 11 new servers create 1,000 new server SKU’s. 

The new G6 blade servers that suppport the new Nehalem chips include the ProLiant BL280c, the BL460c, and the BL490c. With Intels “Nehalem EX” octocore Xeons coming later this year for four-socket and larger servers as well as the six-core “Istanbul” Opteron chips from AMD it looks like even more ProLiant server SKU’s are on the cards.  As the names suggest, they are all compatible with the SMB-style “Shorty” c3000 chassis or the larger c7000 chassis. 

HP is also integrating its ThermalLogic technologies, created for its BladeSystem blade servers, into its rack-based ProLiants. This technology allows different parts of a system to be cooled independently and monitored via an array of 32 different smart sensors allowing the server to adjust fan speeds and memory and I/O capacity as workloads change.

The new G6’s  also include dynamic power capping, which will allow administrators to set a power threshold for a server and  allow the server itself to quiesce various components to ensure that it stays under the level set. The technology will also allow one or more machines in a rack to run hot if their workloads require. Another green change within the ProLiant G6 family is the move to to a standard set of power supplies. HP is offering a 460-watt supply with a 92 per cent efficiency, a 750-watt supply with a 92 per cent efficiency, and a 1,200 watt supply with a 90 per cent efficiency allowing administrators to  further reduce their power consumption. 

Along with the G6 launch HP have also released a new set of SmartArray disk controllers that offer up to a 200 per cent improvement in I/O operations per second, and thanks to the Nehalem processors G6 servers will offer at least twice the memory capacity than their predecessors. In many cases, the G6 servers will have 18 DDR3 DIMM slots on the larger servers, on the smaller machines they will have 12 DIMMs.

According to HP they have packaged the industry’s best ideas, innovations and components and put them through 11,000+ quality and design tests and built the new G6’s on the experience of more than 17 million ProLiant servers and 20 years of industry leadership. You can register for HP’s Virtual Web Jam Event  on April 7th to hear more about their latest G6 products: www.hp.com/go/proliant-jam.

It looks like blade servers and server virtualization not only are a perfect fit from a technology point of view but are also becoming the infrastructure of choice when consolidating. 

When commercial blade servers were launched  the sales pitch was all about less cabling, more density, and ease of management. But virtualising servers is allowing organisations to push the efficiencies and densities of blades even further as well as giving them more flexible deployment and recovery options for their applications and business systems.

The Blade.org industry consortium created by IBM and Intel  to promote the use of the BladeCenter design has surveyed a number of organisations which have already adopted blades, hoping to get a feel for their plans for adopting virtualisation. The results show that blade users are rapidly moving towards universal use of virtualisation in addition to blades.  The survey broke down the data into large enterprises (those with more than £700k in total IT budget) and SMB organisations (those with less than £700k). Here’s what the virtualisation adoption looked like in the two groups:

The survey also looked at the market share of various virtulisation vendors. In large companies VMware’s server virtualisation tools are in use at 82% of those polled, while Xen is used in 44% whilst Microsoft’s VirtualServer and Hyper-V are gaining in acceptance. However companies do not appear to be standardising. Among the SMB companies, who made up 77% of the respondents in the survey, VMware’s ESX Server  is used in 65% of the SMB organisations polled, while Xen is deployed at 27% and Microsoft at 21%. Both large enterprises and SMBs cited ease of management, disaster recovery, high availability, as well as energy efficiency as the reasons they wanted to virtualise.

Installing and Configuring OpenFiler

Openfiler is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit industry standard server hardware and can even be installed on PC class hardware. In my own ESX lab I use a Dell XPS 600 PC with two 1.5 Tb SATA drives. One thing to note though is according to the Openfiler web site future  releases of Openfiler may only support 64-bit processors therefore 64bit hardware is highly recommended for new Openfiler installations.

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Overview

Over the next few posts I’ll be taking you through how to build a small two node ESX cluster. Later on we will be using this cluster to create a number of labs  allowing you to become more familiar with a number VMware technologies, configuration techniques and products including the following to name a few:

• VMotion
• DRS
• HA
• Basic and Advanced Network Configurations
• Basic and Advanced Storage Configurations
• VCB
• Site Recovery Manager
• View3
• ThinApp
• Scripting 

 
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