IBM 3400 M3 server upgrade recomendations

[achirkov]

Hello,

We are going upgrade our existing IBM x3400 M3 (xSeries) server used to deploy some VM on ESXi 4.1.

The current server configuration is:

- CPU: Xeon 5620 (1 unit)

- RAM: 24 Gb (2 x 4Gb, 2 x 8Gb)

- IBM HDD 300Gb SAS 2,5" x 4 (RAID5 configuration used)

- ServeRAID M5015 SAS/SATA (512 RAM)

There are 10 - 15 VM on the host with different configurations options.

Possible upgrade options we checking are:

1. Additional CPU Xeon 5620.

2. Additional RAM (8Gb x 2).

3. Additional SAS disks (2 x 300Gb).

Optionally we going to choose SSD disk and corresponding controller (didn't choose yet).

There are some open points regarding upgrade options specific for ESXi 4.1:

1. Different memory configuration can be used for different CPUs. Is it more effective to use symmetric memory configuration than non-symmetric from ESXi performance point of view?

2. In case of more additional memory (16 Gb, 24 Gb, etc.) will VMs performance will be increased significantly?

3. Will additional RAID controller increase datastorage performance than used single RAID5 with more disks?

4. Is it make sense to use SSD disk for this server to increase datastorage performance? How much performance change approx. will be in this case?

5. In case of SSD storage using which controller and SSD disk you can advice?

Thank in advance

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - I would intially look at your current resource consumption and see which resource you are running short on - I would also look at the performance of the VMs and see if any are being either memory or CPU constrained - With all things being equal I would look at adding another CPU but remember you will have to buy anoth ESXi license as ESXi is licensed per physical CPU.- memory however is usally the first resource to face contention.

IN terms of changing out your storage you might have to rebuild your ESXi host as ESXi 4.1 it is difficult to add storage to local datastores

[achirkov]

Thank you for the answers.

Point is for now we used ESXi free and, perhaps, going to get ESXi Essential - it should be enough for most cases we used. And second CPU is the last CPU upgrade point - there only two CPU supported for this server . So per - CPU license is not critical right now, I think.

Regarding memory - as I can see, it's enough for existing VM, but in case of increasing VM quantity additional memory will be necessary. Usually we give enough memory to each VM and don't use swap. So I agreed, we should take more RAM.

We already performed disk storage size increase before for this server (add one more 300 Gb disk) so this procedure is acceptable. Another point is should we upgrade existing RAID, create a new RAID on the same controller or create RAID on another one controller - is it increase data storage performance?

It's also the point SSD option - perhaps we should use this device to some disk performance critical VM and ESXi swap file?