Dell PowerEdge M Reviews

We used it for normal Windows servers before, in my previous client. They used it for regular Windows clients, and they have a significant infrastructure.

I have explored the new iDRAC features. It's similar to what we have in HP as well.

Using the iDRAC feature makes server management much easier for this type of setup. It's quite useful.

Perhaps the processor needs some improvement in terms of processing features. If I remember correctly, the Intel Xeon processor shipped with the Dell PowerEdge M is the 6426Y.

This processor is a 16-core processor that can handle around 32 threads. Now, the HP server we are considering has a 6430 processor, which is 32 cores. It can handle 64 threads. So it's twice as much as the Dell PowerEdge M. However, the memory module, the DDR4-4800, is the same.

But according to reviews and online sources, the memory performance is much better on the Dell PowerEdge. That's where the confusion arises.

Another area of improvement could be scalability. 

I have been working as a system admin for 15 years. So, we used Dell PowerEdge M in the past. 

We had Dell PowerEdge M ranging from the 2900 to the 2950 models. We have the 360 G5, G6, G7, and the 380 G7. And later on, we started virtualizing the environment.

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

If we consider the end users, it would be more than 10,000. This setup is for the Ministry of Education, specifically for a college.

I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten. 

Our clients are planning to upgrade the system infrastructure with Cisco Blades. They want to move away from the complexity of managing other servers.

The initial setup is easy. 

In my current client's environment, but they are more inclined towards Cisco servers and have a large infrastructure based on Cisco blades. They have three different clusters with individual hosts, and they primarily use Hyper-V rather than VMware.

The processor performance is better on the HP, while Dell has an advantage in terms of memory performance. The client is having trouble deciding which one to go for.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. I have worked with the older servers. Even though they were quite old, they performed well because it has been a long time since we acquired Dell servers. I purchased Dell PowerEdge R730 or Dell PowerEdge R740. In general, the parts are reasonably priced compared to other products. They are easy to manage. And I strongly believe that the parts are of better quality.

The tool aims to serve as a hypervisor service for hosting virtual machines.

The tool's most valuable features are high availability and scalability. Its integration is easy. 

Dell PowerEdge M is stable. 

As we need to grow our infrastructure, we can add extra host servers, expand the memory, and increase components as necessary.

I haven't contacted the tool's support yet. 

The tool's deployment is easy and takes around two days to complete. 

The return on investment for us comes from its reliability and stability. The tool has been a good investment because they haven't experienced any downtime, and they keep everything running. 

The product is budget-friendly. The initial cost for each server was around 10,000 euros. It's a standard price, not too high or too low.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

The initial set up was fairly easy. It wasn't difficult compared to other packages. We did the initial set up for Synergy's fibre channel switches before we started but afterwards, we did not have to worry about using the virtualized fibre or anything with them, the storage automatically came with it.

Their features and product overall are comparable to others on the market, nothing stands out. The company should have either been more clear with the packaging, or a little bit more forthcoming with what you needed, what is in the package, and what came with it.

I have been using the solution for a couple of years.

The solution is pretty stable.

The solution integrated well. We were able to still use Synergy, which is our main platform, and usually, as long as you can still use your main platform for upgrades then it is easy to scale. However, if you were to start changing the main hardware out it then becomes more difficult to be able to scale.

The customer service was pretty good.

My career started with using HP servers. The problem aroused when the HP servers became very hot and resource-intensive. We then started using Cisco products, and they were about the same as HP with the issues we were having. Once we moved to Dell products, it all came together, we could use all three. All three had their own separate purpose.

The set up is complex. However, once everything is up and running, it was pretty straightforward. We had a vendor assisting with the initial set up but once we were through those initial problems, finding out the order of how it is supposed to be set up, and finding out the packages needed, you are good to go to use them.

We had to contact a vendor to give us some help with some of the areas of the install.

There are many packages available, it was a benefit using a vendor to help us get a package we needed. If we would not have gone with the vendor we might have been charged unnecessarily for packages we did not need. 

I would recommend using engineers to help make the design for the setup of the solution. This will allow for a clear view of what is needed for your environment, they can identify issues and know exactly what packages are needed before purchasing. 

I rate Dell PowerEdge M a seven out of ten.

Our primary use case for the solution is store virtualization, and it is deployed on-premises via blade servers.

The most valuable features of the solution are its price and performance.

The solution could be improved by continuously looking for ways to make it better.

We have been using the solution for about six years.

The solution is scalable, and approximately 200 employees utilize the solution.

We have had a great experience with customer service and support. I rate them ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. Two people are required for maintenance.

Purchasing the solution outright costs approximately 12,000.

I rate the solution a ten out of ten. However, the solution is good and can be improved by being proactive in making changes that could improve the solution.

I have been using Dell EMC for a number of use cases in my organization. We have made a cluster system and we have it for the LAN and SAN traffic that passes through it.

So far, I haven't applied the LAN traffic and commerce solutions, but I have planned to integrate the solutions. I have not deployed the SAN traffic. I have a one-month plan to deploy the SAN traffic to pass through the LAN switch. This model only has converged solutions. We can do the cluster system so we have converged solutions.

This is the latest generation for Dell EMC Blade System. It has better facilities. I have used the M1000 series and compared to before, the current version is better. 

I have compared Dell EMC to other solutions and have found it to be good. The SAN and LAN traffic, manageability, and upgradability are all good. 

In terms of improvement, it should also offer a hyper-converged option.

Stability is the same compared to the other systems. 

The scalability depends on your needs.

I work in the IT division. Thirty people work under this infrastructure. 

Two or three people are required for maintenance. 

We use all of the blade systems. There are 32 blades. All of the blades run and provide a service. On the other side, there are also 32 blades that are no occupied. We are enrolling the service over there. 

Technical support is really good. I needed to do an upgrade. The network engineer gave us the total possibility to upgrade. They're really good. 

The initial setup is not very complex compared to other models. Other models are more complex. It is better than other systems. We are still in the process of migrating. 

We are upgrading the legacy system to this system. This system is really good as far as the performance, compared to other legacy or older blade models. All of the blade traffic goes through this to a switch. 

For organizations that don't have a blade system, they should start with planning in terms of how to segregate their systems in terms of LAN and SAN systems.

My advice would be to consider that both SAN and LAN traffic are ensured to come together and not separate.

I would rate the Blade Servers a nine out of ten. 

We are using Dell PowerEdge M for application and database servers.

The solution is made with high-quality hardware.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge M for approximately seven years.

Dell PowerEdge M is stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have had some issues with the vendor's support that we have received. When you open up a support case with Dell they send a partner to assist you and in our experience, they are lacking knowledge about the solution. There are times when you need professional support from the vendor that knows the solution well. 

Here in my country, it has been a problem for Dell to keep offices here. This has been a problem for other vendors too, such as HP.

Dell PowerEdge M price is comparable to other solutions but cheaper than IBM. However, the IBM solution is a higher grade solution whereas Dell PowerEdge M is a medium-level solution.

I have evaluated HPE solutions.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Dell PowerEdge M an eight out of ten.

Fitting 40 logical cores and 400GB of RAM into one half-height blade allows me to achieve the density in a cloud environment I aim for. What's more is it handles workloads of 25 VMs and more without any noticeable penalty performance-wise. Despite having 20 physical cores running into two sockets on one board, the vCPU-ready times remain good throughout, while averaging 4 X vCPU for each physical core per blade.

The density achieved by the M630 while maintaining good performance allowed us to cut our hardware footprint by more than half. This makes for a huge cost saving, not only for hardware to maintain and rack space rental costs, but also reduces the required overall hypervisor licensing, which doesn't come cheap.

For a half-height blade, Dell did well with this one, not leaving much room for improvement. The ever-increasing boot time due to ever-increasing POST checks with every new generation makes maintenance tasks somewhat of a headache. That and the occasional chip creep causes one to have to re-seat DIMMs from time to time. Other than that, not much can be said in terms of cons.

If Dell can reduce the chip creep specially on the RAM modules that would e great. This does not occur that often but often enough to try and improve on. Each blade having each own iDRAC instance makes sense for connecting to a single blade on an ad-hoc base but becomes pain when having to access the local console for all blades in a chassis one after the other.

Each connection requires downloading the java aplet from the blade and jumping though a few hoops before it runs. When closing the aplet and one needs to connect to that same blade again the entire process needs to be repeated again. Performing this same task on an IBM blade chassis is a breeze. The CMC provides one with a drop down list listing all slots in the chassis. This allows one switch between local console mode for all blades in the chassis without any repetitive aplet downloads or even having to configure a management IP address for each blade.

Even though this is more of a blade chassis feature than a blade feature Dell would do well in stealing this page from IBM's book.

I have been using it for almost one year.

These units have proven very stable. Even with component failure, in most cases, the unit keeps running, allowing one to migrate workloads off of it first, before attending to any break\fixes.

This solution has proven very scalable.

Technical support generally is acceptable. Having to jump through hoops can sometime be frustrating. Especially when your firmware has to be on the latest version before further assistance will be given. Even though I understand the logic behind it, keeping an entire environment on the latest version is nearly impossible at the rate firmware, drivers and other patches are released.

I have used IBM blade chassis before. The change to Dell at the time was more a financial one - one that I now fully support from a technical perspective.

Setting up the solution is fairly straightforward. If you have any experience on rack-mounts historically, it should all be familiar. Some networking and storage zoning is to be expected as well, though.

The price tag on the M630 can easily be compared to that of most beefy rack mounts out there. And that with very little internal storage. If the aim is raw processing power in a dense and scalable solution with shared storage available, little out there will rival it. Keeping an eye on the exchange rate can make for some huge cost saving, as well, especially when looking to purchase a fully populated 16-blade chassis.

Having used predecessors like the M610 and M620 over the years, refreshing with M630s was the obvious choice.

When increasing the core count of the CPU when requesting a quote, be wary of the big jumps in price going from an 8-core CPU to 10-core or more etc. Dell doesn't give a price per component breakdown on their quotes. Getting two quotes for the same blade where only the CPUs differ will clearly indicate the huge price they associate per core.

• Density
• Cost
• Feature set
• Manageability

The low cost and high density of the solution has allowed us to place more compute assets per data center rack and increase our virtual machine count. Our customers rent VMs and compute space from us via a traditional IaaS model. The more VMs and the more compute per rack, the better.

I would like to see a broader range of chassis networking options. Cisco was an option at one time and then not. I am not sure if they are again.

I have used it for 3+ years.

I have not encountered any stability issues. Our only issues with the solution have revolved around firmware interoperability between networking firmware and storage array firmware.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 10/10.

We were using 1U rack mount servers. We switched for density reasons at the time. But now, today, 1U servers are able to accommodate larger amounts of memory and 22-core processors. Additional data center deployments have moved back to 1U designs.

Initial setup was straightforward. The chassis is easy to use and manage. Easy-to-use interfaces allowed for rapid deployment.

Blade chassis can be found on the used market super cheap. If a company already has the M1000e chassis and support under contract, I would advise buying additional chassis on the refurb and second-hand market. If that is not an option, Dell pricing starts high and ends up low after negotiation. They seem to have a large amount of room to move on the initial quoted pricing.

We looked at options from Cisco. Pricing was too high for 1/2 the density.

It’s a solid solution. I recommend it. But in today’s always-on environments and virtual deployments in redundant designs, used hardware is not a bad option. We have quotes on the table for fully populated chassis with 16 blade servers and 4 MXL switches for around $40,000. Compared to about $9k for a single new blade. Given that today’s blades are higher density with newer processors, 1-2 year-old equipment is still a valid solution for our needs.