Blade servers for ESX hosts

[Azadeh]

Hi there

There is a company which want to purchase bladesystems for their ESX hosts and they have to run SAN devices for their storage needs.

Which kind of HP Blade systems is recommended ? I work in IBM bladeservers and don't have any information about HO one's ... please help me on this regards.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hi!

Well it's really just the HP C-class that's available. c7000 and c3000.

What you can chose are the different interconnect modules (pass-through, san-switches, virtual connect, flex10, and more) and servers (bl460c being the most common one).

The answer to the servers would be how much performance you would need etc?
The answer to the interconnects would be if it's a whole new setup or if you're integrating it. Maybe pass-through is nice if you have available ports in the SAN/LAN etc.

Here's some information about the c7000:
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/enclosures/c-class/c7000/

[gunelius]

This is usually a given, but make sure your host hardware is listed on VMware's Hardware Compatibility Guide (http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php).  Other than that, you need to choose the number of processors and memory per host, which is often driven by how many VMs you hope to support per host.  You can opt for the ProLiant BL400c half-height blades (2-processor, 2-12 cores, 12-18 DIMM slots) that use a single blade enclosure slot, BL600c full-height blades (2-4 processor, 4-12 cores, 16-64 DIMM slots) that use two or four enclosure slots.  The number of mezzanine cards per blade server you add for connectivity will also determine how many interconnect modules you'll need for the blade enclosure itself.

Cheers,

Scott