Let me preface this by saying I know that IBM servers just became Lenovo back in the fall. I saw some of the new Lenovo (formerly IBM xSeries line) in person when I was at VMworld in August. The new stuff is heads and shoulders above what the first Lenovo servers were a year or two ago.
Also, I work for an HP partner, so I have not had the opportunity to touch IBM in production in 5 years. Of all the major name brand server hardware I have seen and bought over the past 17 years, I have preferred IBM over anything else. It just feels to me to be better engineered (I'm the son of an electrical and mechanical engineer, so I have a tendency to look at things a little bit differently, perhaps, than many people). It is not uncommon for me to complain about quality. "They just don't make em like they used to", applies to just about everything these days, and I'm only 41..... For those of you who might think I'm young....perhaps, but my first x86 system was a DEC Rainbow 100A with both the 8088 and the Z80 with the 640k expansion, and the 10Meg Winchester hard drive. I still have it and it still runs. I use it to operate my Rhino XR1 Robot. Oh sorry, you said something about servers..... Anyway..... Dell just seems cheap, and yeah, support has been touch and go. I can say the same about support for HP, depending on the day. I've supported a lot of HP and Compaq servers, as well, and while they are better than Dell, in my opinion, they still can't touch IBM/Lenovo for quality of hardware and of support. I also happen to live in North Carolina, right down the road from the team that engineers a lot of their systems. I have actually talked to some of them on the phone, more than once, by going through the "normal" support channels. They just do it better, in my opinion, all the way around.. That's my $0.02 Thanks, Jonathan Sent from Outlook<http://taps.io/outlookmobile> Mobile for Android On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 7:34 PM -0800, "Ryan Finnesey" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: It has been almost 7 years since I selected server hardware. What are peoples preference? I used to be a big HP fan mostly because I used Compaq servers back in the day. I had a lot of clients use Dell mostly because of the price but I found there support poor. How are Lenovo Servers? I am a big ThinkPad fan. I am building a product where I need to deploy a large amount of servers at remote locations. Each server will need to run 4 VMs Microsoft's recommended specs are: o 64-bit dual processor, six core (12 real cores), 2.50 gigahertz (GHz) or higher o 64 gigabytes (GB) ECC RAM o Four 600 GB (or better) 10K RPM 128M Cache SAS 6Gbps disks, configured in a RAID 5 configuration o Three 1 Gbps RJ45 high throughput network adapters Remote monitoring and management will be key. I will most likely be deploying Operations Manager but I need to confirm if I can install software on the Guest OS . Cheers Ryan
