In December 2007, Dell highlighted the virtualization readiness of PowerEdge servers with top VMmark scores for both 2-socket and 4-socket systems.
This paper examines the performance of Exchange Server 2007 on VMware ESX 3 with 500, 1000, and 2000 user workloads.
The purpose of this Forrester Consulting study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of the Dell Solution. Forrester's aim is to clearly show all calculations and assumptions that go into the analysis. This study should be seen as a guide to better understand and evaluate Dell'sserver consolidation and virtualization solutions.
This overview of Dell Virtualization Reference Architecture (RA) white paper describes three validated configurations of Dell|VMware virtual infrastructure. The Virtualization RA enables customers to consider, evaluate, and select the most suitable Dell virtualization solution configuration according to their requirements by providing selection criteria and discussing relevant performance issues.
This paper suggests how an enterprise-critical messaging application like Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 should be sized and deployed on VMware® ESX Server to obtain a satisfactory Quality of Service.
by Dave Jaffe
New iSCSI storage arrays from Dell Inc. provide cost-effective, easy-to-deploy shared storage solutions for applications like the VMware Infrastructure 3 server virtualization software. In this paper features and performance of the DellTM PowerVaultTM NX1950, the Dell/EMC CX3 line of Fibre Channel/iSCSI combination storage arrays, and the Dell/EMC AX150i are compared, instructions for using with VMware are given, and recommendations are made when to use which.
Many vendors have published various "results" touting their offerings as having superior virtualization performance, but there has been inconsistent and often questionable methodologies used. This has led to widespread customer confusion, creating a critical need for a standardized methodology. To this end, Dell has partnered with VMware to create a standard measure of performance and capacity of virtualized environments via the VMmark1 workload consolidation benchmark. The initial release of VMmark is slated for early 2007; at that time, VMware will begin accepting results for review, and will host a list of compliant results on their website to allow customers to easily compare the performance of virtualization solutions from different vendors.
By Todd Muirhead, Dave Jaffe, and Terry Schroeder
A test was conducted with VMware Infrastructure 3 on the Dell PowerEdge 2950 and the HP ProLiant DL585 G2 servers. The results of these tests show that three PowerEdge 2950 two-socket servers can provide up to 44% more performance, 57% more performance per watt and a 95% average advantage in price / performance than two HP ProLiant DL585 G2 four-socket servers.
By Balasubramanian Chandrasekaran, Puneet Dhawan
Dell Virtualization Solutions Engineering describes how administrators can combine Dell's OpenManage Systems Management suite with the cluster resources of VMware Infrastructure 3 to achieve proactive maintenance that enhances service continuity and adaptive power utilization that further drives down power and cooling costs.
By Todd Muirhead
To assess virtualization scalability and performance, Dell engineers tested two DellTM PowerEdgeTM 2950 servers with dual-core Intel® Xeon® 5160 and quad-core Intel Xeon X5355 processors alongside a previous-generation PowerEdge 2850 server with dual-core Intel Xeon processors in a virtualized environment based on VMware® Virtual Infrastructure 3. The results show that the PowerEdge 2950 servers can provide enhanced performance and host more virtual machines than the PowerEdge 2850.
By Todd Muirhead; Rick Merino; Dave Jaffe, Ph.D.; and Jon Mercado
The Dell IT group uses a server farm running virtualization software to provide more than 1,000 test and development environments on fewer than 100 physical servers. This farm enables Dell IT to manage the test and development environments with a small team of administrators, allowing engineers and developers to focus on a wide range of internal projects and minimize time spent setting up test environments.
By David J. Morse, August 2006
Dell's ninth generation of PowerEdge servers provide an unparalleled level of performance over the previous generation, with Intel Core Microarchitecture processors and fast memory speeds with FB-DIMMs.
This paper will quantify these performance gains within a virtualized environment by using VMware Infrastructure 3.The results demonstrated a gain of up to 2.2X from a PowerEdge 1850 compared to the Dell PowerEdge 1950.
By Dave Jaffe, Todd Muirhead, and Balasubramanian Chandrasekaran, December 2005
Dell's 1855 blade server performance in a VMotion live migration scenario well beyond a typical scenario. Live migration of virtual machines - VMotion - is typically used for routine maintenance, load balancing, and fault tolerance. These are migrations that some IT managers use anywhere from twice a day to twice a week. But what about ten times in ten minutes? Dell engineers found that the Dell 1855 Blade server can handle twice that amount - 20 migrations in 10 minutes -- with negligible impact on the virtual machine application performance.
By Todd Muirhead, Dave Jaffe and Scott Stanford - July 2005
VMware ESX Server Software on Dell PowerEdge 2850 and PowerEdge 6850 servers provide a virtualization platform that is capable of supporting a wide variety of applications and operating systems. Choosing the right PowerEdge Server depends on many factors that mostly depend on what the intended number, size, performance requirements, and availability requirements of the virtualized environments to be run.
By Amresh Singh, C S Prasanna Nanda, and Scott Stanford - November 2005
Dell Scalable Enterprise engineers present how VMware ESX Server virtual CPU resources can be managed to help achieve flexibility and resource utilization in a virtualized Internet Mail protocol computing environment.
By Amresh Singh, Craig Lowery, C S Prasanna Nanda, Rudramuni B, and Scott Stanford - October 2005
Test results from Dell's Scalable Enterprise team can help System Engineers and IT Architects size, optimise, and scale virtual machines.
By Todd Muirhead, Dave Jaffe and Scott Stanford - July 2005
VMware ESX Server Software on Dell PowerEdge 2850 and PowerEdge 6850 servers provide a virtualization platform that is capable of supporting a wide variety of applications and operating systems. Choosing the right PowerEdge Server depends on many factors that mostly depend on what the intended number, size, performance requirements, and availability requirements of the virtualized environments to be run.
By Dave Jaffe, Ph.D and Todd Muirhead - March 2005
For server consolidation, fault tolerance and ease of administration, many enterprises have moved all or part of their data center applications onto virtual machines using VMware ESX Server running on multiple Dell servers.
