If you want to go the SAN route with automatic failover of the Cluster, ESXi is not the solution, you would need to go with the VSphere solution to get all the bells and whistles you would need. What you basically asking for is the feature set of a High Availability Datacenter solution that ESXi was simply not put out there to fill.
As far as cost point, you need the enclosure and out 4 blades to make it cost effective over a series of 1U servers, as a warning when you're putting the funds together for the hardware. I don't know any recent research into the cost comparisons I am going of data from about 3 years ago. HP has a very good blade solution (C-class) if I remember. As a side not, I have tested SRCDS inside a VM under VSphere, didn't have lag issues, but again, this was a controlled environment where I can test the VPS when it had the CPU/memory resources it actually required to support the solution. Mileage may actually vary. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Christoffer Pedersen Sent: Monday, February 22, 2010 3:08 AM To: Half-Life dedicated Win32 server mailing list Subject: Re: [hlds] Bladecenter anything worth? Hi. Thanks for the reply, i could really use that. I will do some more research for this, and if its affordable, ill go for it. If not, i will keep with my 1U/2U rackservers. At my primary work, we do have a big IBM bladecenter, i may ask my boss about the power consumption Thanks again. - Christoffer On Feb 22, 2010, at 8:55 AM, Matt Stanton wrote: > Obviously, virtualization does cause you to lose a small amount of > hardware power to the extra operating system overhead of vistualizing > many machines on one physical server. What you can gain in reliability > may make it worth it, though. > > Basically, you could guarantee that any 'dedicated server' is available > much more reliably. If you connect your bladecenter to a SAN of some > sort, and are able to intelligently distribute VMs over the blades, then > if a piece of physical hardware goes down, the VM can be automatically > booted on hardware that is running properly, with very little data loss > because of I/O that was interrupted by the hardware issue. Since all > the data from all the servers is stored on the SAN, the data is somewhat > shielded from hardware failure. > > There are a few virtual machine platforms that will allow you to > accomplish this, including, I believe, VMWare ESXi (I think they changed > the name of this recently) or Xen... You'll have to do your own > research into these if no one else replies, since I have absolutely no > experience with virtualization. You will also probably have to expect > that you will be spending a huge amount of money building a SAN that is > both fast and reliable. If you run the datacenter that the servers are > hosted from, then you could also expect better cooling and power usage > efficiency by going this direction, and if not, you will at least be > using less rack space. A bladecenter will require a lot more power per > rack than a rack full of 1U/2U servers, so you may have to pay extra per > rack for the extra amperage you'll need. > > On 2/22/2010 1:29 AM, Christoffer Pedersen wrote: >> Hi everyone. >> >> Im looking to build up a new farm of servers for my company. We are >> currently using 1U and 2U servers for our hosting, but i have been >> thinking of, if it was better to build the whole stuff in >> bladecenters, and virtualize. I just want to know if this is any good? >> I have never tried to host srcds on virtual machines, so i would be >> happy if you could help me here :) >> >> _______________________________________________ >> To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: >> http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds >> > > > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: > http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds
