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  • 1.  VM density on M605 Blades

    Posted Nov 04, 2010 03:37 PM

    I am trying to determine vm density on a M605 blade from Dell. The system is a 2 socket 6 Core AMD with 32GB RAM. Is there a decent formula out there? Simply divinding available memory does not give me a real world number.



  • 2.  RE: VM density on M605 Blades

    Posted Nov 04, 2010 03:42 PM

    The only way to truly get an idea is to know the workload your VMs will have. Also, it depends on your deployment model as far as vCPUs and so on.

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  • 3.  RE: VM density on M605 Blades

    Posted Nov 04, 2010 03:52 PM

    Just looking for a ball park. 2vCPU 2 GB RAM is the average. My simple math says 16 VMs would be the most but I am sure that due to memory page sharing, this number could be higher.



  • 4.  RE: VM density on M605 Blades

    Posted Nov 04, 2010 03:56 PM

    It could be higher but again, I stress that your ratio will need to take into consideration the workload of the VMs placed on it.

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  • 5.  RE: VM density on M605 Blades

    Posted Nov 04, 2010 07:21 PM

    I'm running M610's with 24GB of RAM

    I have about 5 VM's running on each host, each VM getting 4GB RAM

    No issues, Im sure I could go more too.



  • 6.  RE: VM density on M605 Blades

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Nov 04, 2010 07:32 PM

    jamesbowling has the right idea. You should consider the types of applications that are going to be run, knowing a "ballpark" number for the workloads can give you a much more realistic number. If you are looking to P2V some existing servers, you can gather metrics from there and get a good idea. There are other considerations as well, is this intended dto be a clustered environment? What is the criticality of the VM's that will be on the hosts?



  • 7.  RE: VM density on M605 Blades

    Posted Nov 04, 2010 08:02 PM

    I have several M610 Blades with 24gb memory. Most of them have 7-12 VMs; web-servers, DB-servers, term-servers. One of them has 20 VMs of archived and lightly-used systems.