C-Class blades and VMware

[JordanWhitmarsh]

Hi, I was looking for some advice on the following points:

We are seeking best practice for virtualization (especially VDI) density and resilience in Blade Enclosures.

e.g.

HP C7000 Blade Enclosures each with 16 x 460c Blades (Dual Quad-Core Procs with 4Gb per core)
Each blade will host approx 50 VMs = 800 VMs per Blade Enclosure

Note, there will be approximately 4800 VMs in the infrastructure.

Questions:
• What is the best practice for matching Virtual Centre instances to the number of VMs to transition
o i.e. 1 VC per 4800 VMs? 2 VC per 2400 VMs? etc
• Best practice is to dedicate a gigabit LAN to VMotion traffic but how necessary is this?
• Can VMotion cope with jumbo frames?

[Leonhard Kurz_1]

Hello,

take a look at the doku (http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35/vi3_35_25_config_max.pdf):
VirtualCenter Maximums latest Version 2.5:
Number of virtual machines: 2000
Number of hosts per DRS cluster: 32
Number of hosts per HA cluster: 32
Number of hosts per VirtualCenter server: 200

This is the maximum though, it depends on your hardware, database and load of curse. Keep in mind, that some information from esx to vc is udp and if this info get's lost, strange things can happen, so you better make sure your vc(s) is(are) capable of the load.

The gigabit lan for VMotion *is* neccesary, but could be on a VLAN on a trunk together with service console e.g. It's not so much about bandwidth but about isolating the traffic. I would recommend the 4 port mezzanine NIC on the blades and 1:10 interconnect switches. 6 NICs per blade is fine usually.

Starting with 3.5, ESX is capable of jumbo frames, I doubt it'll help with VMotion.

IMHO the trickiest part is choosing the right broker.

HTH

Cheers
__Leo

[JordanWhitmarsh]

Thanks, you have been very helpful.

Any more opinions would be welcome!