Host servers confirmed

Our order for the DL585’s has had a delivery date confirmed. First week of October we’ll get our hands on the production VM hosts. For the more technically interested readers I will try to shoot some photo’s of these babies arriving.

It’s exciting for us as they are the biggest investment we have ever made into single servers and they will outperform anything we currently have by a huge margin. (Our “biggest” servers currently are dual IBM x346 and dual Proliant DL380’s).

Another short update: no decision as yet on the storage. We didn’t anticipate it but it’s going to be a decision for the board of directors so it will take more time than expected. Next opportunity for a decision is 18 September or the week after that.

Platespin: LVM support

The issue I wrote about in my last Platespin post has been resolved. Unfortunately it has been confirmed that Platespin does not support LVM volumes.

Migration of these servers (= approx. 40 Linux servers) will therefore consist of deploying a new VM based on our standard SLES template and then copying everything over. Fortunately for us most of the data on our Linux servers already resides on the SAN so the time lost by not being able to automate the migration with Platespin is not that much but it will mean extra effort per server.

We’ll have to do some tests on the impact of this on our planning.