Blade Servers and
Virtualization—
Improving Your
Power & Cooling
Efficiency
This E-Guide, brought to you by the editors of SearchServerVirtualization.com, provides tips on using blades and virtualization, details new virtualization product enhancements and offerings, and sets the record straight on myths and misconceptions around power, cooling and consolidation.
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents:
Latest blade servers great fit for virtualization, analyst says
How to avoid virtual server sprawl: Virtualization planning tools, blade server considerations Blades and virtualization: Power, cooling myths and tips
HP panders to virtualization crowd with new blade server, software and services Resources from Hewlett-Packard
Blade Servers and
Virtualization—
Improving Your
Power & Cooling
Efficiency
Latest blade servers great fit for virtualization, analyst says
By Jan Stafford, Editorial Director, SearchServerVirtualization.com
Sure, early blade server products ran too hot, cost too much and lacked configuration flexibility; but that’s old news, says analyst Barb Goldworm. Today’s new breed of blades may not be perfect, she says in this interview, but they run cool and are cost-effective when teamed with virtualization.
In this interview, Goldworm addresses the reasons why IT managers say they’re not using blades, details advance-ments that have made blades better, and gives tips on using blades and virtualization together. Goldworm is presi-dent and chief analyst of Focus Consulting, a research, analyst and consulting firm focused on systems, software, and storage, and author of a new book, Blades and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs, published by Wiley.
SearchServerVirtualization.com:Why do you think blade servers are a good platform for virtualization?
Barb Goldworm:Blades and virtualization address many of the same issues—consolidating to save space, reducing time to provision new servers, improving manageability, improving utilization of resources—so implementing them together as a hardware/software combination can provide double the benefits with a single implementation effort. Now that blades are available with all the same options as rack servers (which wasn’t true originally), virtualizing on blades gives the same configuration options, plus the additional benefits of blades. Examples of these additional benefits include modular components, shared components—power, cooling, management and networking—built-in remote, out-of-band management, pre-wiring, and of course, high density.
What did you hear from IT managers who are using blades when you were researching your book?
Goldworm:Those who had implemented virtualization on blades consistently told us that combining the two gave them much more for their money. One user, quoted in the book, advocated using deploying server virtualization on blades whenever possible. He said:
“The configuration becomes so much more manageable and redundant, and that boosts efficiency even more. Why? Because blades not only take up half the space of traditional 1U servers, but they also share vital resources such as switches and interface cards, allowing for more simplified, centralized management.”
In our recent survey, the majority of IT managers responding said they have not bought and, in 2007, will not buy blade servers. Let’s discuss their reasons for not buying blades, starting with the high cost of a blade chassis.
Goldworm:This [reason] is only valid for implementations with small numbers of servers. Although a blade chassis does mean an up-front investment in the chassis before paying for the individual blades, when you amortize the cost of the chassis and the shared components across all the blades, the cost per server is comparable or even less.
What’s your view on another barrier respondents listed: the vendor lock-in that comes with a chassis?
Goldworm:There is a lock-in issue, in that blades from one vendor’s chassis don’t fit in another vendor’s chassis. However, there is nothing to stop users from having chassis from more than one vendor. In fact, some users choose to do so to avoid having a sole source vendor issue, just as they do with rack servers.
In general, what we see is that users tend to standardize on one or two server vendors for most of their server needs. Then when they move to blades, they choose the blade vendors based on their preferred server vendors; e.g., if they’ve standardized on HP, IBM or Dell servers, they move to HP, IBM or Dell blades. It’s also important to realize that all the blade chassis support multiple configurations of blades. You are not tied to populating an entire chassis with identical processors, identical memory, or identical storage configurations, thus creating a great deal of flexibility.
In our survey, a huge majority believe that blades’ heat issue hasn’t been resolved. In fact, a few keep their chassis half-loaded to reduce heat issues. Is overheating just an issue with servers built prior to 2007, or does it persist today?
Goldworm:In the earlier days of blades, cooling was a big issue, and many users ran half loaded. The past year has seen significant improvement in power and cooling efficiencies and management. In some data centers, cooling may be an issue; but, in many datacenters, there are lots of things that can be done to improve cooling and allow blades to be easily incorporated in the datacenter. In addition, chip, blade and power/cooling vendors are still work-ing on this issue, with improvements continuwork-ing to come.
Is there still a problem with blades’ lack of flexibility in peripherals?
Goldworm:There’s probably some confusion here as well. In early blade systems, there were several areas of lim-ited flexibility with I/O. First, the embedded switches in the chassis were limlim-ited to certain vendors and certain fea-tures from those vendors. Now the switch options have expanded both in the vendors supported and in the feafea-tures available on the switches. In addition, if you don’t want to use embedded switches, you can always use the pass-through options to connect to external switches, just like you would with rack servers.
The other area that caused concern early on—and still does for those relying on old information—is the myth that blades only allow 2 NICs per blade, which would be particularly problematic for virtualizing on blades. Fortunately, this limit is no longer valid, and most blades now go up to 6 or 8 NICS per blade (depending on the vendor). For those less-frequent applications requiring specific non-standard cards, there are some that are not available in a blade form factor. Those applications would not run on most blades, however, there are some blade vendors (e.g., Sun, Hitachi) who support standard PCI-express cards as add-ins to their blade chassis.
How do blades stand up to racks in ease of management?
Goldworm:Blades offer significant improvements in ease of management due to their architecture. Blades were designed from the outset for remote lights-out management. Even if the OS is down, you still have remote
management capabilities to every component in the chassis, without doing any special wiring (it’s all pre-wired). The chassis includes redundant management modules which are automatically connected to everything. In addition, if there is a failure, even a non-technical person can read the lights, pop out a failed blade and pop a new blade in. Initial deployment is simplified by the pre-wiring, and ongoing cable management is far easier for the same reason. Blade chassis wiring always looks like the person who does the wiring is extremely fastidious.
In addition, some of the new virtual I/O capabilities offered in blades this year add to the ongoing management benefits by simplifying configuration changes. For example, HP’s Virtual Connect for the HP BladeSystem abstracts the physical I/O connections from the components within the network allowing changes to be made within the chassis without having to reconfigure everything outside the chassis.
From your answers, it seems that many objections to using blades are based on users’ negative experiences with first-generation blades.
Goldworm:Yes. Since many of the concerns I hear from folks are based on old data, I encourage people to get the most up-to-date information they can before making their next round of strategic decisions. While neither blades nor virtualization are right for every IT shop or every application, they both offer significant advantages in both real dollars and ongoing soft costs.
How to avoid virtual server sprawl: Virtualization planning
tools, blade server considerations
By Anne Skamarock, Contributor, SearchServerVirtualization.com
Server virtualization is a good thing. It provides better utilization of resources, reduces server footprint and power and cooling in the data center and provides for more efficient management of the application environment. However, as with all things, too much of a good thing can be bad. The good news is that there are tools, technologies and strategies available to help right-size your server consolidation. In this tip, I will introduce you to some toolsets that will help you analyze your existing infrastructure and provide some tips for preventing over-consolidation on blade servers.
Tools of the trade
One of the best toolsets on the market is CiRBA’s Data Center Intelligence software. It allows you to collect data over a period of time, across your entire server infrastructure looking at all aspects of server utilization, memory, network, disk, and processor usage. Once you have collected the data, a visual report is generated highlighting possible consolidation matches. This report can then have business rules layered on top to create what-if scenarios to better understand risk.
Another option is to get consulting services through IBM, HP or a VMware Authorized Consulting partner using VMware Capacity Planner. These services provide a full assessment of your infrastructure, much like the CiRBA toolset, but with a consultant running the tools and providing the assessment.
One tip on collecting data: No matter who does the assessment, I recommend data be collected for no less than two weeks, and a month would be better. If your business has specific “peak periods—end-of-year financials, new product releases, tax season, etc.—it is advisable to collect data during one or more of those peak periods to get an accurate representation of workload.
Virtualizing with blade servers
Since the advent of server virtualization for consolidation, system technologies have evolved to better accommodate and support a shared environment, such as larger memory sizes, multi-core multi-socket processors, etc.
One platform where changes have been made is in blade servers. Blade servers and virtualization go together beautifully. Blade servers provide more compute power per square foot of space than rack-mount servers and use less power per system than rack-mount servers. However, due to the fact that all power, cooling, external I/O— network, SAN, NAS—and cables are shared across all blades in a blade system, you have to be aware that by implementing server virtualization in this environment, you will be sharing already shared components. This is why it is so important to have an accurate characterization of your application environment, and consider using tools like the ones I mentioned earlier.
How to avoid virtual server sprawl: Virtualization planning tools, blade server considerations
Although there may be issues consolidating in this already-consolidated environment, there are number of solu-tions. The first solution is to reduce the number of virtual servers running on each of the blades. Another option is to reconsider how you will implement your external networks, which can be implemented a number of ways. One way is to use IP-based storage solutions—such as iSCSI, SAN or NAS—with high-performance accelerated network adapters. This works especially well if you have not already implemented a Fibre-Channel SAN or you are looking to consolidate the number of different fabrics in your IT environment. There are two 10 GB Ethernet adapters on the market from Chelsio and NetEffect, which can run all types of IP traffic through one adapter. This requires only one, dual-port high-bandwidth adapter per blade (rather than up to three), which connects into two (for redundancy) 10 GB switch modules in the back of the blade chassis, and allows plenty of headroom for all external networking. Another option is to upgrade your SAN infrastructure to interoperate with the newer 8 GB fibre channel adapters.This is a good option, especially if 8 GB fibre channel is in your future anyway.
Blades are not the only platform on which you can over-consolidate your servers. Rack servers are equally prone. However, because some of the bladed environment is already shared, it’s important to understand the environment in which you are deploying consolidated servers, and to understand the solutions for mitigating bottlenecks.
How to avoid virtual server sprawl: Virtualization planning tools, blade server considerations
Blades and virtualization: Power, cooling myths and tips
By Barb Goldworm, Contributor, SearchServerVirtualization.com
The problem in power and cooling, aside from the continuing increases in costs, is generally not having enough— power coming into the datacenter, circuits on the UPS or battery backup, and/or cooling ability in the data center and of the air conditioning system (computer room air conditioner or CRAC). In addition, remember that cooling requires additional power to run the cooling system, so it’s a double whammy.
Consolidating servers through virtualization allows you to reduce the number of physical servers in the data center, sometimes significantly, and therefore reduce all the power and cooling requirements, as well as physical space. Consolidating onto blades further reduces the amount of power and cooling required per server (over a comparable rack mounted server) and offers even better space utilization. However, the increased density of blades will require more cooling per footprint for the blade portion of the data center. In fact at a rack level, blades can represent an increase from 2-5kW per rack of legacy servers to 20+ kW for a rack of blades. Overall, consolidation with virtual-ization and blades can offer significant help with both space and power and cooling, but awareness of power/cooling requirements and careful planning are essential.
Power and cooling reductions and increases
When estimating power consumption after consolidation, it is important to estimate both the number of physical servers, and their power rating, since the new servers probably will be more powerful and will have a higher power rating.
The numbers on the server nameplate indicate maximum power consumption for that server. Since power consump-tion is related to utilizaconsump-tion, this number will vary with workload and utilizaconsump-tion, up to the maximum.
Since an idle server still uses power, power consumption does not correlate directly to utilization. APC recommends using a steady state of 67% as an average.
Check with your power company on possible incentive or rebate programs around virtualization and consolidation. For example, last November, Pacific Gas and Electric launched a program offering users incentive payments of $150 to $300 per server eliminated through consolidation. Users are required to conduct an inventory before they start their consolidation project and apply to PG&E for the incentive program. Eventually this program will probably become a rebate program, where users could simply send their reports after the fact and receive a rebate (the amount per server of the rebate has not yet been determined). According to VMware, they are working with other utility companies around the country on similar offerings.
There are a variety of tools and services available for planning your consolidation project. Check with your server and virtualization vendors, power and cooling partners, and reseller/integrator for tools such as power calculators and capacity planning tools. VMware, for example has a capacity planning tool which can be used by their profession-al services group to take an inventory of your current environment and monitor it over a period of time, including
hardware and software utilization, peaks, etc. They can then use the information to recommend phases of implemen-tation for consolidation and for new equipment recommendations.
Look for help from your partners in planning for power and cooling needs, both the reductions and increases based on fewer servers running higher powered processors, with a higher density form factor. Take advantage of power and cooling audit and assessment services and get recommendations on how to make your data center energy efficient as you implement these new technologies going forward.
Futures
A number of vendors are now working together to help address power and cooling issues. AMD, APC, Dell, HP, IBM, Rackable Systems, SprayCool, Sun Microsystems, and VMware joined together as founding members in an organization called the Green Grid, an association of information technology professionals seeking to lower the overall consumption of power in datacenters around the world. Their goals include developing and offering best practices on efficient power management in data centers, promoting energy efficiency initiatives, and developing standards and methodologies for measuring power.
Blade vendors have made great progress in the current generations of blade systems, improving power and cooling efficiencies significantly. IBM says that they have increased the efficiency of their power supplies from 65% efficiency in their 1U servers to 91% efficiency in BladeCenter H. (65% efficiency means that they convert 65 % of the power at the wall and the rest goes into room in the form of heat. In other words, for each 1kW from the power provider, 650 W goes to the server, and 350 W goes into room). Blade vendors are continuing to work on heat issues, with a variety of options for cooling at the blade, rack and room level. Liquid cooling continues to be a controversial option for many, though chilled water has been a part of IBM mainframe data centers for decades. In addition to the improvements in power and cooling efficiencies, there are enhancements now and coming soon in software management capabilities. IBM and HP, for example have added new levels of intelligence in their blade server management capabilities to monitor thermal status, and actively manage components when thermal prob-lems occur. VMware is planning additional intelligence in their Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS) product, allowing users to automate processes such as dynamically consolidating workloads to fewer servers, and powering down inactive servers, based on DRS user-configured rules. In addition, rules might also instruct DRS to power down memory or reduce CPU frequency based on utilization and inactivity. These types of features are available today in certain other hardware offerings, such as HP’s Integrity products, but not yet in their blade offerings.
Bottom line
Clearly, power and cooling issues are hot priorities for data centers today, with users looking for help from hard-ware, softhard-ware, and power companies, as well as resellers and integrators. Virtualization and blades can both directly contribute to addressing these issues. There are still many misconceptions about whether blades help or hurt in this area, often based on old data. Choose your partners carefully, and make sure you’re working with up-to-date information. If you do, and you plan well, consolidating through virtualization on blades can save you big bucks in the short and long term.
HP panders to virtualization crowd with new blade server,
software and services
By Bridget Botelho, News Writer, SearchServerVirtualization.com
Hewlett-Packard Co. introduced a new blade server designed to run virtualization and numerous related software products and services.
The HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade is designed with more memory, data storage and network connections than other HP servers have to meet the needs of memory and I/O-hungry virtual machines (VMs).
Based on the typical configuration of 4 GB per virtual machine, the BL495c can support a minimum of 32 VMs. Customers filling an HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosure with 16 BL495c server blades can utilize up to 512 VMs, HP reported.
The BL495c is powered by AMD Opteron 2300 Series processors. HP will add support for Intel Corp. processors later in the year.
Key components of the BL495c blade server include the following: • 16 memory slots for up to 128 GB of memory capacity
• Support for fast and reliable solid-state drives that use less than 2 watts of power—the first HP blade to do so
• Extensive storage options, including the ability to expand to multiple terabytes of disk per server • Built-in virtualization for Citrix XenServer and VMware ESXi (also supports Microsoft Hyper-V)
Jim Ganthier, the director of marketing for HP BladeSystems, said the BL495c has twice the memory typically found in a blade and twice the typical number of network interface cards (NICs) (eight versus the usual four).
Full specifications for the HP ProLiant BL495c server blade are available on HP’s website.
The HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade server will be available Sept. 15. Pricing starts at $2,449.
Rounding out HP’s virtualization push
HP also announced new product enhancements and offerings. Here is a quick overview:
• the new HP asset management identifies and manages VM inventory and licenses, allowing customers to pay for only those licenses they need;
HP panders to virtualization crowd with new blade server, software and services
• a new strategic development agreement with Red Hat simplifies the monitoring and management of virtualized environments;
• HP virtualization support services to help users transition to and manage new virtualization technology and reduce the risk of unplanned downtime;
• HP StorageWorks 4400 Scalable NAS File Services, a combination of the HP StorageWorks 4400 Enterprise Virtual Array, file servers, management software, and Windows or Linux support to virtualize the connection between servers and storage. This reduces maintenance costs and mitigates the risk of data loss with advanced replication software; and
• HP Virtualization Accelerator Services, a new, predefined consulting service for planning, designing and implementing virtualization initiatives for faster return on investment.
HP panders to virtualization crowd with new blade server, software and services
Resources from Hewlett-Packard
EMA Analyst Paper: Virtualization and Management: Trends, Forecasts, and Recommendations IDC Paper: The Business Value of Virtualization: Realizing the Benefits of Integrated Solutions Forrester Paper: The IT Consolidation Imperative: Out Of Space, Out Of Power, Out Of Money Data Sheet: AMD Virtualization Performance
About Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard is one of the world's largest computer companies and the foremost producer of test and measure-ment instrumeasure-ments. The company's more than 29,000 products are used by people for personal use and in industry, business, engineering, science, medicine and education.
In addition, the company makes networking products, medical electronic equipment, instruments and systems for chemical analysis, handheld calculators and electronic components.
HP is among the top 20 on the Fortune 500 list. The company had net revenue of $42.9 billion in its 1997 fiscal year. More than 56 percent of its business comes from outside the United States, and more than two-thirds of that is from Europe. Other principal markets are Japan, Canada, Australasia, the Far East and Latin America. HP ranks among the top 10 U.S. exporters. HP is No. 5 among Fortune's Most Admired Companies and No. 10 among Fortune's Best Companies to Work for in America.
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, the company employs more than 120,000 people, of whom some 69,000 work in the United States. HP has major sites in 28 U.S. cities and in Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Canada.
HP sells its products and services through about 600 sales and support offices and distributorships in more than 120 countries, and through resellers and retailers.
www.hp.com
