http://bladewatch.disqus.com/enWed, 27 Aug 2008 22:27:28 -0000http://www.bladewatch.com/2008/08/26/hp-proliant-dl785-g5-rocks-at-vmware/#comment-1884171really depends on the environment your on and how high you want to stack workloads. i've setup 16 node clusters with a mixture of 2 socket and 4 socket quads (Intel) and would have used 8 sockets if Intel still made them. I started way back with a mix of DL580G2's and DL740's w ESX 2.x and had great success. More procs; more places to schedule VM's and they can get the performance attention they ask for.KeithWed, 27 Aug 2008 22:27:28 -0000http://www.bladewatch.com/2008/08/26/hp-proliant-dl785-g5-rocks-at-vmware/#comment-1866453Don't you need to weigh the options of that consolidation in terms of space, power and support in the fact that you are putting a lot of eggs in one basket. Don't get me wrong, it's a very nice box, but say you are going to run ~96 VM's on it, what about redundancy/HA. As my environment has grown, it has become a big concern for me. Do I get fewer larger boxes(8 socket) and put them in a HA cluster, or spread the load out over more smaller boxes(4 socket). I have a production cluster of three 4socket QuadCore servers with 90 VM's running in it. Monday, one of the servers took a hit while we had a case open and HA failed to work properly. I lost 30 vm's for little over 30 minutes. For production, I can't see the risk, but maybe as a dev/stage environment I can see a larger box like this being useful.DGoWed, 27 Aug 2008 07:26:57 -0000