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.

Related posts:

1. Cisco New Generation UCS Servers Range with Intel E7 Chipset

Cisco is going to launch the new generation Blade and Rack mount base machine which will bring another major changes to the x86 open system again.

According to the link here www.theregister.co.uk,  it should able to push the total memory up to 1TB per 2 U machine in single chassis. The C260M2 will come with 2 x 10Gb Ethernet and 4 x gigabits NICs, which is very sufficient for most of the deployment today on stand alone or virtualize environment. Cisco claimed it will ship the B230 M2, B440M2 with Intel E-7 base chip set. Once again, I am very excited for this to reach the market as it will transform the server infrastructure and virtualization infrastructure deployment in the future.

You can read more from the original post here.

Related posts:

1. UCS Firmware 1.4 support FCoE Direct Attach SAN

Weird Thing had happened here as we maximize the CPU utilization, but the total MHZ on the ESX host had exceeded the calculation if we base on 12 x 2.93 Ghz. I am still trying to understand in details how the system can stretch more than the available capacity on the total Ghz it suppose to have with the chip set on the machine. If you do have any valuable comment to explain this, feel free to comment here as I am interesting to learn this out.

]]> http://malaysiavm.com/blog/maximize-cpu-utilization-on-esx-host-with-cisco-ucs-b250m2/feed/ 4 http://malaysiavm.com/blog/intel-new-chipset-5600-series/ http://malaysiavm.com/blog/intel-new-chipset-5600-series/#comments Sat, 27 Mar 2010 08:24:22 +0000 craig http://malaysiavm.com/blog/?p=1862 Intel had launched the latest chipset 5600 series recently. Original I was thought that all the new chipset should come with 6 cores per physical CPU. Luckily I did my research just now and found that not all Intel 5600 series will come with 6 cores. Only specified model will have 6 cores in place. I attach the picture as a reference for you all. Have fun

Here, I would like to share how to change virtual machine virtual network adapter manually. In fact, you may know you can add a new virtual adapter and choose the adapter type from drop down menu.

Here you go:

1. Login to VMware ESX server
2. Type vmware-cmd -l and look for virtual machine (vmx = vm config file) which require change virtual network adapter
3. You may check VMware KB Article: 1001805 for available network adapters details.

# VMXNET — The VMXNET virtual network adapter has no physical counterpart. VMXNET is optimized for performance in a virtual machine. Because operating system vendors do not provide built-in drivers for this card, you must install VMware Tools to have a driver for the VMXNET network adapter available.

# Flexible — The Flexible network adapter identifies itself as a Vlance adapter when a virtual machine boots, but initializes itself and functions as either a Vlance or a VMXNET adapter, depending on which driver initializes it. With VMware Tools installed, the VMXNET driver changes the Vlance adapter to the higher performance VMXNET adapter.

# E1000 — An emulated version of the Intel 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet NIC, with drivers available in most newer guest operating systems, including Windows XP and later and Linux versions 2.4.19 and later.

# VMXNET 2 (Enhanced) — The VMXNET 2 adapter is based on the VMXNET adapter but provides some high-performance features commonly used on modern networks, such as jumbo frames and hardware offloads. This virtual network adapter is available only for some guest operating systems on ESX/ESXi 3.5 and later.

4. Edit Virtual Machine vmx file and choose virtual network adapter as show below:

Flexible
Nothing have to add into vmx file.

VMXNET 3
ethernetX.virtualDev = “vmxnet3″

Note: ethernetX = number of ethernet card.

5. Save the VMX file and power on your virtual machine.
6. Power on your virtual machine using virtual center or type # vmware-cmd your_virtualmachine.vmx start

Enjoy!

VMETC

Virtualization Review

Both articles talk a little bit Nehalem. Personally, I will be very excited to take a test on this and perform the test comparison within the current quad core. VMETC did mention as it will able to support up to 21 VMs per core, and this is a real amazing number to be achieved.  Nehalem quad core will able to replace 9 single core xeon processors with 20 % energy saving.  This will boost up the CPU performance and reduce the power consumption.

Here I am interesting to show 1 of the screen shot I capture during my stress test on the ESX host for our production machine which hit to 100% of the CPU  utilization on the ESX host level.

Click the picture above for full view

This will be really amazing if we can keep this kind of utilization without impact to the performance for the VM guests. Unfortunately, it does slow down the VM guests in my case as many of us know that we shouldn’t keep the ESX servers resource utilization actively more than 90%. In this round of test, I manage to achieve 40 : 1 ESX host consolidation at my ESX Servers. The normal day, we will always have 28 : 1 as minimal.

Price cut from Intel and 6 cores cpu will definately increase the consolidation ratio in our case moving forward. The integration with the latest technology and ESX 4 will really help in the case to achieve higher number consolidation ratio moving forward.

Information Week – Intel slash processor price

In this economy situation, this is really helpful. For my personal experience, we always experience price increase significantly when we choose the upgrade of processor spec from 2.6Ghz to 3.0Ghz. The new pricing will allow the vendor to revise their current servers pricing and helpful for us who need powerful chips to support the virtualization environment. I am really waiting the price cuts from the vendor in my negotiation for my additional ESX servers that I plan.

Personally I had been urging the storage and network vendor over and over again regarding the 10Ge products. The reason of it is pretty simple that the Fiber Channel is just too expensive to be deployed and managed VS ethernet 10Ge. But the concern is the vendor are very slow responding to the 10Ge release roadmap although customers are demanding on that.

With Intel moving to the market now, I will see that is a big opportunitty to make this 10Ge become inexpensive in the future with the high volume production provide by Intel in the servers’ market NIC. As virtualization become an important piece in the data center, the bandwidth will required to be grow as much as possible at the same time VS CPU Cores and Memory. Intel had proven their right track on the servers NIC as many of us can easily found that the server NICs are produced by Intel. Even in VMware ESX servers, your VM will be provided either AMD or Intel virtual NIC drivers on top of the hypervisor Virtualization.

As a IT Consumers, I am more than happy to see the technology become cheaper and cheaper and of course personally I do believe Intel will able to make the popularization for 10Ge moving forward.