Hear from the product engineers and product marketing managers about the newest editions to the Dell Blade portfolio, the Dell PowerEdge M805 and PowerEdge M905 Blades, as well as FlexAddress capabilities for helping minimize downtime.

Technical Community - Background Reading

Previous Chat Sessions on Blade Topics

• 06-24-08 : Flexible Blades Management Features - Mike Roberts, Armando Acosta, and Chad Fenner
  
• 06-17-08 : Architecting Blade Management - Scott Hanson
• 06-10-08 : Managing Blades - Scott Hanson
• 07-22-08 : Blade FlexAddress - Samit Ashdhir and Scott Hanson
• 09-09-08 : Bulking Up Dell Blades Web Chat - Scott Hanson and Armando Acosta
  

Technical Teardown of M805 and M905
Dell PowerEdge M805 Product Details
Dell PowerEdge M905 Product Details

Chat Transcript

Dell-RogerF	Afternoon
DELL_AndyF	Hi Roger, evening here :-)
Dell-RogerF	Oh, that's right. Switzerland?
DELL_AndyF	The Netherlands this week, Sa2.0 training
DELL_AndyF	You think they will have time for the chat?
Dell-RogerF	I'd be surprised if Scott or Todd showed up today as they are at VMworld this week. They are Twittering though http://twitter.com/delltechcenter on what they are seeing. In their absence, Armando is going to join us to talk about the new blades that were announced.
DELL_AndyF	Okay
	Armando75 joined.
Dell-RogerF	Hey Armando. Made it back on time!
Armando75	Roger I'm here.
Armando75	Yes, I wouldn't miss it
Armando75	Should we wait for more to join?
Dell-RogerF	I'd recommend another couple of minutes.
Dell-RogerF	Andy, any questions for Armando the Blades guru?
DELL_AndyF	Had not a chance to play with them
DELL_AndyF	The only question that is open atm, is how will the quad-port NICs connect to the switches; could not find an overview quickly that shows the data paths
Armando75	Andy, each M805 and M905 has the capability to house four daughter cards Each daughter card is dual port and connects to the mid-plane through the I/O modules
Armando75	In the Blade NDA deck we have a detailed description of how each of the data paths is routed
Dell-RogerF	Nothing public though?
Armando75	We don't have anything public
DELL_AndyF	I'll have a look, thanks
Armando75	Fabric A must always be Ethernet
Armando75	Fabric B and C are customizable for Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Infiniband
Armando75	Each port on a single card routes to a separate I/O module
DELL_AndyF	But if I understand right, we will get a four-port Ethernet card, will each two ports share one data path then? What about bandwidth?
Armando75	There are no plans for a four port; each card is dual port
Armando75	Bandwidth is not a concern as our midplane will support up to 5.4 TB of throughput
Armando75	Each I/O module can support from 1 to 4 lanes
Armando75	For max throughput
DELL_AndyF	We are limited to four Ethernet NICs; if we also have Fibre Channel in the chassis
Armando75	It’s four I/O cards per blade for full-height. Here is the detailed breakdown: two separate Fabric B cards, two separate Fabric C cards, two ports per I/O card, and each port on a single card routes to a separate I/O module
DELL_AndyF	Okay, six Ethernet NICs then, and two FC HBA; I'm happy
Armando75	Fabric A still must be Ethernet
Armando75	Correct. That is the beauty of the full height; it utilizes the I/O paths for two slots in the chassis
DELL_AndyF	Okay, but I have to look at a drawing with the routing, as four I/O cards to six modules can't be a 1-to-1 connection, but I get the idea
DELL_AndyF	Are all our customers at VMworld?
Armando75	Andy, I can send you a slide; the visual will do more justice
Armando75	How are you listed in the directory?
Dell-RogerF	Well, probably not all Dell customers are at VMworld, but maybe all of Scott and Todd's followers
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Dell-RogerF	Welcome User.
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Armando75	Did you run him off?
Dell-RogerF	Some people are just shy like that.
Dell-RogerF	Armando, a couple more newbie questions if you don't mind?
DELL_AndyF	This was the HP spy ;-)
Armando75	Sure, shoot
Dell-RogerF	You just went over the increased I/O with Andy. The new blades also have much more memory too don't they?
Armando75	Yes, the M805 has 16 DIMMs, and the M905 has 24
DELL_AndyF	Woohoo
Armando75	On the M905 we have 50 percent more memory capacity than the competition
Armando75	This is beneficial for I/O-intensive applications like virtualization and databases
Dell-RogerF	Does that get memory "balanced" then with respect to CPU utilization for Exchange, databases, etc.?
Armando75	Not only that, but this allows customers to use lower-cost memory configurations
Armando75	Yes, plus the AMD direct connect architecture allows for better utilization of CPU and memory
Dell-RogerF	How's that? I guess I'm not familiar with direct connect. Got a URL with more info?
Armando75	It’s on the AMD Web site; you can't miss it
Armando75	It also utilizes the chipset more efficiently
Dell-RogerF	These also are our first blades with embedded hypervisor on an SD card?
Armando75	Correct
Dell-RogerF	So with the SD and FlexAddress enabled I can truly just plug in or replace a blade and be instantly up with a new VM host?
Armando75	Yes, the SD card provides that capability. FlexAddress allows for persistent identity for WWN and MAC addresses
Armando75	Thus, if a blade goes down, the user just has to replace the blade, load an image, and identity is maintained
Armando75	FlexAddress is a simple, low-cost way to limit downtime
Armando75	No need to map NIC I/O paths
Armando75	IP addresses are maintained
Armando75	For both Fibre Channel storage and iSCSI storage
Dell-RogerF	By maintained, you mean in the chassis, not the blades, right?
Armando75	Correct, it’s assigned to the slot in the chassis
DELL_AndyF	Even the IP address?
Dell-RogerF	Okay, looked out on the TechCenter and found the demo Scott did earlier: www.delltechcenter.com/page/poweredge+blade+demos
DELL_AndyF	So the IP configured in the OS is some kind of Nat'ed to the slot address?
Armando75	We do this through the CMC and an SD card that houses the static addresses, so they can never be duplicated
Armando75	Sorry, should have been more clear in my explanation
Armando75	The IP address is maintained to either Fibre Channel storage or iSCSI storage
Armando75	When setting up Fibre Channel storage, each storage processor is assigned an IP address; this is done for data routing purposes
Armando75	Thus, if the blade goes down, there is no need to zone the switch and route to the storage controller IP address
Armando75	FlexAddress maintains that connection
Armando75	MAC addresses are used for iSCSI storage
Armando75	WWN for Fibre Channel storage
DELL_AndyF	That's how I understood it; FlexAddress makes the physical layer addressing slot persistent and not server/blade persistent, but for higher-layer addressing TCP/IP you need your own system, like DHCP address reservation, which is working fine as the MAC address does not change
Armando75	Yes, you are correct
Armando75	Plus our address is never duplicated, so the user doesn't cause any issues with duplicate IP addresses
Dell-RogerF	Since you're here, Armando, any comments you want to make on power with respect to the new blades or in general?
Armando75	Our friends at HP force customers to maintain their own pool of IP addresses and make the customer maintain a database
Armando75	Not very user friendly
Armando75	Yes, we have a couple of third-party white papers that will show Dell performance per watt advantage
Armando75	I don't want to steal Tom Cloyd's thunder, so please stay tuned
Dell-RogerF	No problem. Just post them as an update on the TechCenter blades page, so I get an e-mail that there's something new.
Armando75	Will do
Dell-RogerF	Thanks so much for coming today, Armando. Anything else you want to share?
Armando75	Nope that is it for today; thanks for the time
Dell-RogerF	Maybe a teaser on next week's topic?
Dell-RogerF	Good to see you here today too, Andy. Hope to see you next week!
Armando75	We will go further into the capabilities of FlexAddress and how it integrates into existing Cisco environments
Armando75	Have a nice day!