Intel had officially announced the latest Intel Xeon E7 family which bring more cores, more performance per CPU compare to the previous 8 cores processors in the market today. This is great news to the IT users especially cloud vendor, users or anyone who are the virtualization adopter. This will allow you to further scale out the amount of physical memory and computing power by reduce the physical foot print and management require.
here is the latest Intel Xeon E7 Data sheet. You can view the full copy over here.
Once again, I believe the consolidation ratio will be significant increase in most of the virtualization project in future.
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If you are following Cisco Unified computing solution, here is some good news. The latest firmware version 1.4 is officially support direct attach FCoE Storage protocol without require the additional SAN switch as previous version. Both Netapp and EMC are officially supported and certified to direct attach with the Cisco UCS without a SAN switch require. This will reduce the complex layer it require to deploy especially for those environment who are not FC users previously.
I found some very good post over the internet, you can refer the URL below for more information about the new update provided in Firmware 1.4
Unified Computing Blog
M. Sean McGee
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There is known issues been faced by small group of user who had deployed their VMware ESX host on the latest platform with G7. You can refer to the official link from HP here and additional KB from VMWare referring to the same issues. If you are facing this, you may be the unlucky 1, but nothing much you could do as the PSOD message will refer to the CPU error, compatible issues and etc.
The only thing you could do is to wait until both HP and VMware to come out a final fix in this case. Quick solution, is change hardware vendor or different platform. I had experienced 3 times about it, in the past 2 months and this is the latest finding we had received from both VMware and HP regards the latest PSOD we had. HP had recommended to upgrade the BIOS, Firmware and driver for multiple times, but this doesn’t fix the issue we are facing. Lately there had release another new update bios and hope this problem will be gone after this.
Feel free to share any work around solution beside the official link provided by tech support.
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The recent release firmware for Cisco UCS version 1.4 had enabled the support of new blade B230M1 and C series rack mount server integration allow server management from UCS manager. This is a big major changes to the IT market today. Now you will enjoy service profile functionality similar to blade system in Cisco UCS even though if you choose to deploy a rack mount base solution. Not every environment will go with blade system only, therefore Cisco UCS C series rack mount solution integrate with UCS manager is important. It is interesting to monitor the respond from others server vendor such as HP, IBM, DELL, SUN and etc for this major improvement.
Here is the sample screen shot
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Recently there are couple of issues I had faced on the latest DL 585 G7 server which installed with ESX 4.0 Update 2. The common problem reported by couple of users are same which could potentially caused all the network traffic dead off for the entire ESX host. The even worst case could be happen and cause Purple screen to the ESX host. The current solution is to either update the NICs driver with the latest version, but I will suggest to disable all on board NIC and replace with either Broadcom and Intel Gigabits adaptor. This will isolate unnecessary issues which I had not seen in others servers brand.
Please refer to the VMware Forum Here for the confirmation on bugs with multiple users who experience the same issues as I did.
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