Help me choose blade storage for vmware

[Magnus von Rosen]

I'm with an outsourcing partner, and a customer has been aquried by bigger fish. They have about 40 VMs in our vmware environment. They have asked us to recommend a setup where we can move all their VMs from us to their own hardware so they can just put it in a truck and hook it up at the new provider site.

What they are using:
4.8 TB data without thin provisioning. TP will reduce that amount, but I imagine they would also like to be able to grow some, so 5 TB today and the possibility to grow would be nice.

53GB RAM used today.
11,5Ghz CPU usage at one random business hour check.

We are using HP blade servers today, which we like. I was thinking a C3000 enclosure with a pair of BL490s, each with dual quad 2,5Ghz and 72 GB Ram. That should hold well even if one fails. For storage, I was thinking some sort of blade storage. I'm not quite sure how those units work together. Does anyone what I need to work with vmware 4? It has to be a storage that can be simultaneously accessed by several hosts, of course. I guess one would use iSCSI or NFS. Lefthand software?
Another plus for the blade system is that the customer has other leased blades with us. He could buy those from us and put them in the same enclosure and not have to re-install.

Also, if you could also suggest a setup with 19" equipment instead. What kind of disk system would I be looking at? The server part I think I got, a pair of DL360's for instance.

Thanks!
Magnus, Sweden

[JKytsi]

Go with MSA2000fc or EVA4400. Performance and availability are something else compared to bladeformat solutions.

[BrianDoyle]

Hi Magnus,
You really first need to find out what resources youre VMs are using and what CPU and RAM they will require.
Firstly the servers, the BL490c is a good choice, has 18DIMM slots and can hold two 4quad core CPUs along with SSDs. The BL465c G6 is another option, has two 6-core processors but hold less DIMMs (8 i think).
You mentioned looking at blade storage but i think only choose blade storage if it suits you're needs with an iSCSI SAN. I'd prefer have a FC EVA4400 for increased storage and performance.