Proliant G7 vs G8 for vmware vSphere: which is better ?

[Davide Depaoli_3]

Hi,

I have no experience with new G8 proliant, and I have to do an offer for a technology refresh to my customer.

does anyone help me to choose between G7 and G8 (DL380 or BL460c) ?

thanks in advance

regards

Davide

[Goutham_Sabala]

Are you looking for documents that will help customer to understand about gen8?

[Matti_Kurkela]

Do you mean a _single_ system?

BL460c is a blade server, and must be placed in a c3000 or c7000 blade chassis. It cannot run outside a blade chassis.

If you don't have an existing blade chassis with a free slot, buying a single BL460c server would make no sense.

On the other hand, if your customer might be replacing 8-16 servers with similar configurations and the configuration is doable with the c-class blade architecture, it might be a good time to get this customer started with the blade architecture.

If special PCI/PCIe cards are required, a DL380 is probably a better choice: although the c-class blade range includes a expansion blade that can take PCI/PCIe cards, any cabling for the cards would need to be routed to the front of the rack, which can interfere with cooling and/or maintenance, especially if you need many cards/cables.

As to the choice between G7 and G8... you'll need to consider the customer's requirements. G7 servers are well-known, proven technology: the required drivers should be well debugged by now. G8 is brand new, and likely to offer more raw computing power... but might have some driver bugs and other surprises. With G8, you should pay attention to the customer's VMware versions: does the version the customer is using support the G8 hardware as-is, or is a VMware upgrade required? Would the customer accept such an upgrade? What is the customer's general position in terms of absolute computing power vs. reliability?

[Davide Depaoli_3]

No, I'm not looking for documents. Are there some special docs about gen8 ?

Thank you

Davide

[Davide Depaoli_3]

I'm evaluating two kind of solutions:

First one:

Three DL380 G7 or G8 + one P2000 G3 + vSphere Enterprise 5.0

Second one:

One c3000 with three BL460c G7 or G8 + one P2000 G3 + vSphere Enterprise 5.0

The customer actually is using two DL485 + one MSA1000 + vSphere Enterprise 4.0

My question  is about performance of G7 and G8 because I have no experience with G8 servers.

Thanks

Davide

[Goutham_Sabala]

Well their has been huge boost on performance as latest gen of controllers/hdd/dimms are being used on gen8 servers, their is a unified link for gen8 documents which will be useful to start with
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/unified/gen_8.html