We're using VMware on a normal rack mounted server and considering getting another.
I see these days I can pick blade enclosures and servers up for relatively low cost and see the term blade and vm mentioned quite a lot.
So my question – how would a blade setup work with wmware – is the whole enclosure seen as one big machine and yhr more blades you add the more computing power/resources you get in VMware – or are the just x number of seperate servers?
J
Best Answer
Blade Centres are a way of achieving a high density of computer power in a small, well defined and contained unit. Other than their ability to reduce cabling mess, power drain, space requirements, etc. compared to traditional 1U servers, there's nothing special about them; each blade is a seperate server and you still need to plan how to provision, manage, etc. each blade (though some high end blade centres will come with tools to make this easier, too...).
They have potential disadvantages too; a blade centre with just a few blades might cost more than a number of equally configured 1U servers, they generally can't carry massive local storage on each blade, and network/comms might be an issue, both in terms of number of ports available and flexability of configuration.
Having said that, we use Dell's current Blade offerings for some of our ESXi servers and we've been very pleased with them, and I know plenty of other places that are using blades from other vendors equally happily.