Sep 29th, 2007
VMware and Blades
A lot of people I have talked to think that blade servers (IBM Bladecenter, Sun Blade 6000, etc.) and VMware are exclusive strategies. This really isn’t the case. People flock to virtualization because they want a) better resource utilization of their hardware or b) to get better footprint utilization in their datacenter. Virtualization means that there are still going to be a handful of servers required for capacity and redundancy.
Blade servers are built for environments that use shared storage (SAN/NAS) or need little expansion. They also have a lot more backend bandwidth than normal servers do because of their interconnected backplane between nodes and the storage and ip networks. This is perfect for VMware. Most organizations are deploying it out on a SAN or NAS anyway and really need flexible resource allocation to provision new servers or handle spikes in VM activity.
It’s a new spin on virtualization and allows for even better consolidation in an environment with only a little bit more incremental cost. I know Sun’s blade chasis list for $5,000 and blades start at $3,600. People aren’t buying $1,000 servers for VMware so with 3-4 servers needing to be purchased for VMware, a blade center chasis isn’t much more in the bigger picture.
Where it gets interesting: Desktop virtualization with VDI (VMware Desktop Infrastructure), dynamic resource allocations with blades powering themselves up and down as needed and more.