Random Questions blade and virtualization

[user001]

Hi,

I've got a couple of random questions, i'm trying to learn more about blades and virtualization.

1. Blades vs SIngle rackmount server

I'm just curious about performance would an old rx2600 server be the equivalant to a new blade?

I've done a bit of reading and blades seem to be aimed at single task servers e.g. just web servers or just mail servers. Isthisthe case? I can see use huge company running a bunch of blade enclousers for one task but is it just as effective tohave one running a dc the other mail, file server etc...i guess you could just virtualize a couple of biggger blades and run acluster then get even more out of it.

Blades seem really expensive so when do you know its time to go blade or just buy a bunch of dl's, vmware cluster andsplit it up? 

2. If i purchase a tape library with fiber can i connect this to a san switch and then point this to a vmware MS Server guest running Data Protetor?

Any links to documentation appreciated i seem to be running loops on the HP blade sites.

[Torsten.]

>> I'm just curious about performance would an old rx2600 server be the equivalant to a new blade?

The current blades of the Integrity server family are BL860ci2, BL870ci2 and BL890ci2.

The rx2600 is a 2 core CPU system - the blades scale from a single quad core CPU up to 8 quad core CPUs (32 cores) - you can imagine these much newer CPUs are faster. In addition you get 10Gb NICs and up to 8Gb FC cards and really a lot of memory.

Even on them you can run virtualization (either virtual machines or vPars 6.x), so you can scale them for your application needs.

A blade enclosure can contain all needed infrastructure (fc and network switches, etc ...), hence the price.

[user001]

Do you know of any figures hanging around, i've got a struggling dual cpu rx2600 and need to check to see if blades will do the job.

how about redundancy.

it seems if the enclosure fails everything fails?

i get that it has redundant network, psu, storage etc.

thanks.

[Torsten.]

The blade enclosure have a passive backplane, all other components are/can be redundant (power supplies, fans, interconnects). For real high avaiability you should have 2 enclosures in different location as usual, so you can cluster your servers.

[Michael A. McKenney]

We just bought a C7000, two Flex-10s, two Brocade 8/24s, 6 blades, VMWare, All the host level licensing from Microsoft, CA, Symantec, etc.  

1.) We did it because it will improve future server upgrades.   Replacing or adding a blade is easier than a physical server.

2.) You add resources to a blade, it is shared across all virtual servers

3.) Fail over and redundancy

4.) Software costs are Year 1 for VMWare, it is very expensive but over 8 years you save money.

5.) Cost of the Blade Center and all the software over 9 years was about the same as replacing servers every three years.

6.) Cost of 2 physical servers = One blade with VMware, Microsoft Data Center and all other licenses.   You can host 6-8 virtual servers on a blade for the same cost of two physical servers.  

7.) I can create virtual server for each application that requires a reboot on an upgrade.   Less apps are affected during the reboot. 

This is why we did it.