Infrastructure Expert at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
Top 20
Jun 26, 2014
We have been using HP Blade for a large environment (800+ VM) Successfully for some years now but if I was to buy all new I would check vBlock or Flexpod solutions.
Project Manager at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Apr 11, 2014
I would say to use HP Blades..........I have been using it and getting excellent technical and customer support for it. Also, these days, everything is scalable on hardware level too.
A system that we are looking at it is the Dell VRTX, it is a small enclosure that can fit four blades and includes shared storage. We are an SMB and many of the dedicated SANs are overkill and over priced for our usage. We have a total of 44 vms across 3 hosts using ESX 5.1 currently but not using blades. I've posted i link to the VRTX below. Good luck.
www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-vrtx/pd
Well it depends on the environment and your needs. ie: budget and users supported.
Vmware has a HCL which you can go against. I personally line HP Proliant DL or ML series with 32 -64 Gb and mirrored 100 GB Flash Disk for VMware
use ISCSI w at least 4-6 NICS or 10gb FC
Sales Engineer at a tech consulting company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Apr 10, 2014
For pure ESXi, I recommend the HP blades with internal ssd for use with vflash. This also works great in 5.5 to boost application performance (learned first-hand). The storage is a little trickier without knowing the proposed workloads. Tintri is what my team has used in the past and seems to be favored when it comes to storage designed for Virtualization. Their new vsan product looks like a good alternative to an external SAN (for small deployments) #2cents.
Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Consultant
Apr 10, 2014
Way too many unanswered questions. How many guests will there be? How much usable storage is needed. There are different levels of storage appliances that can meet certain criteria. For example, HP has a small size device (Lefthand or MSA). Then you can get into larger appliances like the 3 PAR.
I personally like HP blades, but it depends what model that will meet your needs. Without doing assessments, it is really hard to give a specific option.
ctSanders has touched on a lot of the other questions as well.
I am assuming since you want blades you have a large environment? If you only need a couple of hosts, maybe rack mount servers could be an option as well. It is not cost effective if you only use half an enclosure for blades.
Partner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Apr 10, 2014
Then I have a question for you before we start answering that question:
Do you have a list of requirements for this endeavor, such as processor speed, disk speed, latency, will there be databases installed on the application, budget/costs? But not only that, what are your storage requirements (IOPS, Speed of disks, replication, vmotion requirements), also, what are the network requirements because you may be looking for NICs that run at 10G or 40G speeds?
There are systems out there to help such as:
• Vblock
• HP Moonshot
• Dell Blade servers
• HP Blade Servers
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VMware vSphere is widely adopted for its virtualization capabilities that enhance hardware efficiency and ensure minimal downtime through features like High Availability and Distributed Resource Scheduler. Despite criticisms about...
We have been using HP Blade for a large environment (800+ VM) Successfully for some years now but if I was to buy all new I would check vBlock or Flexpod solutions.
I would say to use HP Blades..........I have been using it and getting excellent technical and customer support for it. Also, these days, everything is scalable on hardware level too.
A system that we are looking at it is the Dell VRTX, it is a small enclosure that can fit four blades and includes shared storage. We are an SMB and many of the dedicated SANs are overkill and over priced for our usage. We have a total of 44 vms across 3 hosts using ESX 5.1 currently but not using blades. I've posted i link to the VRTX below. Good luck.
www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-vrtx/pd
Well it depends on the environment and your needs. ie: budget and users supported.
Vmware has a HCL which you can go against. I personally line HP Proliant DL or ML series with 32 -64 Gb and mirrored 100 GB Flash Disk for VMware
use ISCSI w at least 4-6 NICS or 10gb FC
Storage NImble Netapp or EMC work best
Hope this helps.
Michael La-B
For pure ESXi, I recommend the HP blades with internal ssd for use with vflash. This also works great in 5.5 to boost application performance (learned first-hand). The storage is a little trickier without knowing the proposed workloads. Tintri is what my team has used in the past and seems to be favored when it comes to storage designed for Virtualization. Their new vsan product looks like a good alternative to an external SAN (for small deployments) #2cents.
Way too many unanswered questions. How many guests will there be? How much usable storage is needed. There are different levels of storage appliances that can meet certain criteria. For example, HP has a small size device (Lefthand or MSA). Then you can get into larger appliances like the 3 PAR.
I personally like HP blades, but it depends what model that will meet your needs. Without doing assessments, it is really hard to give a specific option.
ctSanders has touched on a lot of the other questions as well.
I am assuming since you want blades you have a large environment? If you only need a couple of hosts, maybe rack mount servers could be an option as well. It is not cost effective if you only use half an enclosure for blades.
I like the Dell solution.
I forgot, Cisco has a UCS platform as well.
Todd
Then I have a question for you before we start answering that question:
Do you have a list of requirements for this endeavor, such as processor speed, disk speed, latency, will there be databases installed on the application, budget/costs? But not only that, what are your storage requirements (IOPS, Speed of disks, replication, vmotion requirements), also, what are the network requirements because you may be looking for NICs that run at 10G or 40G speeds?
There are systems out there to help such as:
• Vblock
• HP Moonshot
• Dell Blade servers
• HP Blade Servers
It really just depends
Please advise.
Todd
IBM HS23.