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.

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.

If we analyze what happen to the IT spending on the financial and banking environment, you will not surprise to see that the amount of storage, servers, solution and unnecessary equipment been under utilized for every bank around the world. The IT department for financial sector had been comfort live for many years and is time now for them to review and revise their IT spending to ensure higher return from their investment.

Open source or reliable LINUX had not been really high utilize in financial sector are really due to the comfort living of their IT department. Personal point of view, why we have to run something else on the expensive IBM AIX, mainframe, HP UX, Microsoft, Oracle VS the reliable LINUX from x86 or x64 platform to perform the same result? The simple answer is really the mindset from the person.

If we compare the super computing for research and development, you will find that the top 5 fastest computing in the world are build from the x86 or x64 platform whihc you can common found from the market. If you are telling me that the x86 platform is under power, I will say is depend how you manage and deploy it. Looking at SAP, which is the biggest ERP solution around the world, and they even suggest to run on SUSE or Redhat Linux with the MaxDB and etc. My experience on that, it really perform as require and even outperform when we compare to the AIX machine that we previously have. We know the MAXDB are still far behind the Oracle, but at least from the operating system point of view, the LINUX always provide more reliable compare to Windows or proprited UNIX platform from HP and IBM.

Beside these, you may consider the operation maintenance cost, the open standard will provide more flexible and cost effective. Intel and AMD competition have also promise to increase from 6 cores to 12 cores in 2 years time. The processing power are always increasing from time to time.
I will not believe the x86 will not able to handle the load that require to run for any system in the world today, is really depend how we plan it and manage it. Some of the bank I know, they even run their critical machine on LINUX today, and I do not see the reason of others bank can’t. At the same time, Virtualization will provide the better utilization for every single dollar been invested by the business.

Moving forward to the current economy environment, to survive and sustain for IT department is challenge. Instead of sticking with old and expensive solution, it may end up the CEO will just fire the entire IT department and look for outsource vendor. I believe the IT department have to be more open and follow up with the open technology which are much more cost effective compare with those expensive solution. The more dollars for IT to save, that increase the percentage for the job security as well as business effective. Do not forget, IT is to assist the business to generate revenue higher and faster, you may not want to make IT as a cost and is not profitable when it show up in the entire financial summary to the boards. If that does happen, human will stop using IT and prefer to work on paper and pen again as traditional.

1 of the good example, IBM had ship their regional office to Malaysia from Singapore previously, because they saw the potential market grow in this country as well as more talent source in Malaysia for IT related area. Many of the IT giant are setup the IT hub, data center as well as corporate office in Malaysia to enjoy the TAX free holiday as well as cheaper real estate cost and man power resources. There are HP, IBM, DELL, SHELL, EDS, HSBC, Prudential and etc around in Malaysia. Guess what, most of them are even having their production data center in Malaysia itself.

Now we go back to VMware, virtualization is growing in Malaysia, but the present from VMware are more relay on the partner in here. Training are not provided as what been provided in Sinagpore or Australia. Most of the time, even in singapore training center, the attendees are not Singaporean. As economy crisis now, to attend a training in Singapore will be 3 times more expensive for someone who attending a training in Malaysia. If I not mistaken, they have less than 10 employees in malaysia for VMware itself. It just not big enough to attract the confident of the potential giant customer from Malaysia market if you do not present yourself strong enough as your competitor.

Some customer are willing to go with Microsoft Hyper V just because the support, present and Microsoft Malaysia. As you can also see the Teched having in Malaysia every year for SEA, I believe VMware should consider their option to ship the conference location to Malaysia instead of Singapore. Of course, we do hope VMware will consider a VMworld Asia in the future and be held in south east asia.

High Gas/Petrol price become an global issues, no matter which region or which country are you from, this had become and issue which drive the Operational Cost for a Data Center to keep alive from daily basis. In Malaysia, the goverment had recently increase the commercial eletricity for 26 %. Imagine that if you DC consume RM 30000.00 a mount from power perspective, you had to pay RM 37800.00 a month. that had been significant impact the entire IT budgets plus the operational cost. As IT always be the main driver for most business today, we may need to provide a highly efficient Data center solution which able to recover the ROI within the shortest period as possible. Virtualization & Consolidation had come to the point for this.

As if we compare the power consumption from major chip maker like AMD and Intel, the watts per processor had stack and remain the same for the last 3 generations at least. The only improvement they made was really the perfomance per watt. 6 cores and 8 cores had been down the road, I will be strongly encourage who had not adapt to virtualization need to start virtualize or prepare to virtualize 80% of thier production environment.

My environment currently had running the entire DR solution with VMware technology. In production, I do have more than 50 production VM which provide web hosting, middleware, file & print servers and etc. Imagine you had a tight budget with only 50k USD, how many of physical servers will you able to buy from there? and wat about the amount of power you need to absorb on monthly basis? That is the real cost as many of you may had not see the electric bill. For my case, my cost center had to paid for the power bill ourselve.

To achieve 15:1 in VMware is no longer a big thing with the high capacity server from DELL, HP and IBM. By doing this, you can avoid the multi million renovation to expand your DC which may had nearly full. Technology is cool, but again as human being, we had to work smart. High efficient Data Center sometimes do equivalent to High Productivity of the support team too.