VMWARE Hosts

[Techdw]

Hi

 

I am looking at replacing my VMware host and wondered what the ideal spec would be to go for.

 

Have been looking at some HP 8 core and 10 core with 128GB ram.

 

Any advice would be good...

 

Thanks,

[kmount]

Sorry, more questions than answers:

 

- What spec is current kit?

- What are you running on your current kit? (number of vCPUs vs pCPUs etc)

- Have you ran a capacity planning exercise on it to see what you need?

[Techdw]

3 Host at the moment.

 

Dell / PowerEdge R620 - - - 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2640 0 2.50

128GB Ram

60 CPU Shares Value

[jdell]

We got a HP server for our test and Dev vMware enviroment the other month, it was a DL380 Gen9, 20 X 2.97 GHz Intel E5-2650 v3 CPU's with 256GB DDR4 RAM.Is a very nice unit, and I am looking at getting a couple more to grow the UAT enviroment.

I have also bought Dell R730's which also are very good as VM Hosts.

 

What Kind of load are you looking to pur on it?

What system/servers are you running on it?

What kinda of head room are you looking for over you current enviroment?

[Techdw]

Looking at running

Dc1

Dc2

Fileserver

SCCM

3 TS servers

Print Server

Cashless server

AV server

WDS server

Finance Server

Sims Server

Lib Management server. Oliver

 

All 2012. VMware

[Techdw]

Can I get away with 2 hosts??

[kmount]

I'd say you'll easily get away with 2 hosts looking at those types of servers. It's important to remember that with more cores per CPU these days you get a lot more on a single box than you used to.

 

The key is to make sure your system is still resilient to n+1 should you lose one of your two boxes. So .. your current boxes are 6 core 12 threads, 2 CPUs in each gives you 24 slots to play with.

 

On a modern box with say 2 x 10 or 2 x 12 core CPU's you're looking at 40 or 48 threads so you're well in the realms of almost twice as much oomph per box. (of course there are other considerations but if you're not flattening your current boxes it's reasonable to say it's going to be almost twice as big)

 

Is your current back end storage providing you with enough grunt etc on your needs above (or are these new needs on top of current) - a lot of the time folks focus on the compute and don't think about the bottleneck at the back end.

 

A lot of our smaller customer implementations run on 2 hosts with a third host running backups and acting as a DR host should you lose a host or main server room etc. You could probably repurpose one or two of your current boxes for that role.

 

Those R620's aren't too bad either, if they're under warranty etc are you having performance issues?

[Techdw]

Hi KMount,

 

Thanks for the information.

 

I was going to get the new host in place of the Dells. The Dells have a year left of warrently, but this summer I am doing a whole network rebuild, 30x POE switches, OM4 Fibre, 20 Gig to each stack, new HP SAN 10 Gig link to the hosts, so thought I replaced the Hosts while its all out anyway. I have always used HP servers, so was looking at replacing them with a couple of 10 core servers..

 

HP ProLiant DL360 Gen9 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2650v3 10-Core 2.30GHz 25MB - - - - - 128GB PC4-17000P-R 2133MHz RDIMM

 

No issues with it but if I can get better that would be good.

Edited July 13, 2015 by Techdw