The new Virtual Data Center project has been keeping me really busy, the followings are some of my findings.

• Learn that R810/M910 with 4 sockets will only use 1 memory controller instead of two, memory bandwidth will be cut by half, that sucks! Strange enough, when R810 populates with 2 sockets only, it will use both memory controllers and gain access to all 32 DIMMS. So R810/R910 is still best for 2 sockets server, that why we switch to R710 instead after read the benchmarking, it’s a waste of money to go for R810.
• DDR3L low voltage (1.35V), we populate with 2 DPC (8GB x 12 DIMMS), guess what? Voltage will shoot to normal 1.5V! and no one at Dell pre-sales or pro-support can answer us this, I found out this fact from HP’s resources, ridiculous! Anyway, it’s still running at 1333Mhz, that’s a bless.
• Equallogic PS6000XV 15K should be a monster, we will only be worried about adding front-end (like R710/R720/R730) and adding back-end PS6000XV/PS7000XV etc. in the future, that’s main selling point for this solution, scalable beyond imagination, this really is the whole motivation we selected EQL boxes.
• With the release of vSphere 4.1, VAAI, iSCSI Off-load fully support on Broadcom 5709 but no Jumbo Frame, what the heck! EQL vStorage off-load improvement, Multipath plugin (EQL finally solved the big problem)
• One box of PS6000XV is good enough for 4Gbps, absolutely no need to go for 10Gbps for the time being except you are aiming for that 200M/s increase (yes, it can only reach 650M/s at max, there is no way reaching 1000M/s in reality. We were also told by paying about 1/4 of the box, you can always upgrade to 10Gbps version of PS6010XV in the future, but for our environment, IOPS is way demanding than thoughput, so 4Gbps is more than enough, just get a PowerConnect 5448 with 48 ports, we should have lots of space to grow from here.
• There is a special iSCSI Key need to be purchased in order to have TOE+iSCSI Off-load on R710, this is the same on HP Proliant servers.
• Found HP Proliant’s server resources are much more professional than Dells’, but Dell’s stuff are a lot cheaper (1/3 at least), so we just have to live with that.
• In ESX 4 or above, Thick provisioning is always recommended for performance concerned VM applications, it’s a lot faster.
• Talked to two of the local IDC who’s going to start a cloud business, but their core technical team doesn’t seem to know what they are really doing, seemed they have a long way to go comparing with US counterparts.
• Again, virtualization is the future and you need a good SAN to support it!
• Talk to your inside sales manager, show your sincerity, you will be rewarded and get unbelievable discount at quarter end!
• Dell’s EQL expert is really helpful and resourceful, thank you so much! You are really the super-hero, kick-ass type!