As virtualization become the hottest topic for IT nows day, more and more servers had been built by the vendor to succeed the market demand to virtualize the customer production environment. It always come to a point that the Vendor claim thier servers are the best for virtualization. But in real scenario, as a customer, we will have to spend time to figure out the cost and effective solution for our virtualization

Couples of important point that need to be consider during the implementation of Virtualization is :

  1. Hardware compatibility
  2. Storage choices
  3. networking equipment
  4. System architecture
  5. Support and operation maintenance
  6. CPU model and brand ( AMD or Intel )

This topic I will be more specify to the server model for virtualization. In couple of test and real case experience, I do compare the cost, performance, services and reliability within IBM, HP and DELL before I decide to move forward with my final decision.

DELL had recently launched the R900 and R905 this year specifically to support for 4 physical CPU sockets which able to host up to 16 cores of CPU with the latest quad core technology from both Intel and AMD which allow the memory to scale up to 256GB of physical memory if you go for the 8GB/module in DIMM slot. 1 interesting you may need to look at the servers is the on board 10Gbps capable network ports. The server itself had come with 4 on board NICs with capable to run the next generation ethernet 10Gbps. As network bandwidth become a big challenge after the virtualization, this connection will provide better cabling management and of course higher throughput once the 10GbE in place. The additional PCI slot on the 4U servers do provide flexibility to add-on fiber channel HBA or additional Ethernet card to provide redundancy and fail over path for HA purpose.

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