Dell PowerEdge R900

[Rohail2004]

Is there anyone out there running Dell PowerEdge R900 servers? how many VM's are you running? any feedback would be appreciated.

[RParker]

We have 2. 64Gig RAM 2.4Ghz Cores. With 16 cores you should be able to run 64 VM's. 48 with ease. We have 30 on one, which is a pretty small number for R900, and it runs fine.

[azn2kew]

We have 4 of these with 128GB of RAM with 16 CPU cores, and on average, you can run 4 VMs per core and depends on your types of applications. You can run more file, web, dhcp, dns servers but if you have to run Exchange and SQL, things could be different especially Oracle. So it really depends, but on average 4 VMs per core with 1-2GB of ram is decent. I've ran these R900 hardware for my Citrix XenApp 4.5 farm and it runs great. Each Citrix server, I got an average 25-35 users that is fine for what we expected of course requires some stress test and tweak.

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Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[mylvisaker]

Currently have 4 R900's in a cluster - each with 64gb and 2 cpu's (8 cores). So far they are populated with 25-30 vm's each - still populating the cluster! It depends upon the candidates (and their cpu/memory requirements) that are virtualized into this cluster, but with the current config it looks like maybe 45 vm's per server. This cluster will be constrained by memory before cpu. Of course, the cpu and memory can be expanded. No issues or complaints about the R900's performance.

[dconvery]

Stephan is right on there. I just did a caluclation for a customer. 16 R900 servers, each with four quad cores and 128-256GB RAM. they will be able to host between 500 and 800 VMs.

Dave

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Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties.

Doug Larson

[Rohail2004]

did you migrate your system to R900? what did you do?

[mylvisaker · Accepted solution]

Originally we had a couple of HP's clustered running 3.0.2 with only a handful of vm's. We built a new cluster with the R900's running 3.5 (also built a new 2.5 Virtual Center) . Then presented the same SAN LUNS to the new cluster and removed the vm's from inventory in the old VC, and added the vm's to inventory in the new VC. The majority of vm's replaced physical machines by having a a fresh operating system and app install. We've only done a couple of P2V's. Does that answer your question?

[Rohail2004]

ok, thnx