Anyone here experienced with BLADE servers?

[JasonGW]

Hey, we're looking at maybe migrating our infrastructure over to a set of blades (10 bay enclosure, 8 servers online with two spares at the ready), and I'd like to talk with someone who's worked with them in a production environment.

Some questions I have are:

1. Dell mentions that you can "Provision" a blade slot for a particular OS configuration for easy restore in the event of failure. How does that work? Do you keep a preconfigured 2003 server image on hand? Does it take "snapshots" of that slot's hardware at predefined intervals?

2. How does the OS see the SAN? Is it seen as a network drive or does it appear more inline with how your box would see a SCSI controller and drive?

3. How do you manage filesystems on the SAN? Does it support multiple partitions? NTFS? FAT? Proprietary? Managed through special proprietary software or through Windows' Disk Management Console?

4. MS Exchange server. I assume that you'd store the database on the SAN rather than on the blade itself, but what about recovery in the event that blade fails? This ties back to question #1. If we're dealing with snapshots, that's cool unless they're over 30 days old, in which case you could have some Kerberos problems with that machine on the domain. Not hard to fix, still, but a pain in the a** any way you look at it.

5. What about automatic failover? Can you provision a spare box to keep itself synched, configuration-wise (not file system-wise, because if a virus is what brings your server down you sure as hell don't want to have a backup of that virus that will automatically take over in the event the first box dies or just goes crazy? If it does, will it shut down that other box in order to prevent network problems?

If anyone's fairly nearby (southern california, I'm in Rancho Cucamonga) and has such an environment set up, I'd love to check out your setup and talk to you first hand about the pros and cons of using Blade servers over standalones.

Thanks!

Jason

[aussiecanuck46]

Those are very good questions. Is your vendor able to answer any of them? That's who should get first crack. In fact, they should be challenged to prove that they've provided similar solutions already.

[JasonGW]

Those are very good questions. Is your vendor able to answer any of them? That's who should get first crack. In fact, they should be challenged to prove that they've provided similar solutions already.

LOL, I wish. We're talking with a rep at Insight and we get a gorgeous list of talking points, but ask a technical question and the rep knows squat, heh.

Jason

[aussiecanuck46]

Then why consider their sales pitch? If they can't tell you why you should buy, then....Never mind.

You obviously know what you want, or at least what you want to know. I'd suggest you put out an RFI and see who responds well. This site is more about specific solutions to specific issues than about general network solutions.

[JasonGW]

Then why consider their sales pitch? If they can't tell you why you should buy, then....Never mind.

You obviously know what you want, or at least what you want to know. I'd suggest you put out an RFI and see who responds well. This site is more about specific solutions to specific issues than about general network solutions.

True, but I figured that with all the experts here there's a pretty good chance someone will know something and could maybe make some recommendations. I certainly know what my *requirements* are, I just need to see which solutions end up meeting the majority of those requirements.

Jason

[msright1981]

Then why consider their sales pitch? If they can't tell you why you should buy, then....Never mind.

You obviously know what you want, or at least what you want to know. I'd suggest you put out an RFI and see who responds well. This site is more about specific solutions to specific issues than about general network solutions.

True, but I figured that with all the experts here there's a pretty good chance someone will know something and could maybe make some recommendations. I certainly know what my *requirements* are, I just need to see which solutions end up meeting the majority of those requirements.

Jason

Hi,

Although this still not possible on Dell, but both IBM & HP offer automatic fail over when booting from SAN for their blades. IBM offer Open Fabric Manager & HP offer Virtual Connect so if some one hit this post and looking for automatic failover with boot from SAN you might need to head to HP or IBM upon your preference. A good comparison between the two is also availabe at IBM Blades vs HP Blades

Hope this will help some one.

[iamtheky]

http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pd...-hires-2-16.pdf

Dell EMC will failover disks as well as processor paths, not that I am pro any particular label (I think powerpath is the utility that manages that stuff on the san). Sending the request to a bunch of vendors and playing them off each other is probably an ideal route. Certainly make them quote some custom prices with just the bare bones pieces you need, if they cant do that then you need a new sales person, or vendor.