New VM hosts ordered

As i wrote in my other post we cam to the point of ordering the other two hosts. After some deliberation we have decided to buy the new DL585 G2’s. I haven’t been able to find an exclusive answer to the question of VMotion support between the old hosts (using Opteron 880’s) and the new hosts (using Opteron 8216’s) but CPU masking will enable that anyway.

More important to us is that the Generation 2 of the DL585 can hold up to 64GB of PC5300 memory (running 667Mhz) compared to 32GB PC 3200 (400Mhz) maximum in the Generation 1.

Our new config looks like this (and is added to the server specs page):

• HP ProLiant DL585R02 O/2,4-2P 2 GB (2 Opteron DC 8216 cpu’s / 1 MB cache / SA P400i - 512 MB - BBWC)
• 2x AMD Opteron 8216 2,4 GHz- 1 MB Dual Core (95 Watt) processor option
• 32 GB Dual Rank memory (PC2-5300 / ECC / DDR / SDRAM / (2 x 2 GB)
• 2x 36.4-GB 10K SFF SAS harddisk (10K, SFF SAS, hot pluggable)
• 3x HP NC360T PCI Express Dual Port Gigabit Server Adapter
• Hot Plug Redundant PSU for ProLiant DL580R03/R04 en ML570 G3/G4 en DL585G2
• 2x Fiber channel PCI-X 2.0 4Gb Single HBA

Estimated delivery time is three to four weeks so it will be a nice Christmas gift.

MPR Week 9

After surviving an exhausting ISO 27001 audit I can now write something about our virtualization progress again.

My most imporant conclusion of this week is that virtualization is starting to be FUN ! We now have all the wrinkles out of the conversion progress and we can predict nearly exactly how a conversion is going to run.

Oh, and converting the first fileserver really was that simple. So simple in fact that I believe we can do the next 500GB and 600GB conversion in just under 15 minutes each. It’s so simple and fast that we could even do it without informing the users and they wouldn’t even notice it.

Memory utilization after 38 VM’s is closing in on the 50% mark on the hosts so action is needed there (see other post).

The other conversions were Oracle database servers on Windows and apart from having to copy 100GB from our other datacenter both went without problems. Even the necessary change in the IP address (which our DBA has told me is notoriously difficult with Oracle servers) gave no problems.