VM-100 under Dell PE2950 - and new suitable HW...

LCMember4427 — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 11:45:30 GMT

We have had a VM-100 under VMWare 6.5 ESXi on a 32Gb Dell PowerEdge 2950 for a few years now. We serve a 250 students' high school with dorms so the FW works around the clock... Throughput has been ok with few complaints, but when I checked the monitoring on the VM this morning I saw that CPU load was alarmingly high. See screenshot below. My impression has been that the good ol' 2950 coped relatively nice but after having seen this I think it's time for an upgrade. What do you think..?

What do you suggest as suitable new hardware for our VM-100 with 400Mbit/s fiber access and 300 users..? I dont want to buy a lot more CPU than the VM-100 in this scenario actually requires. So which CPUs and amount of memory should give us most bang for the bucks?

Thanks a lot for comments 🙂

Re: VM-100 under Dell PE2950 - and new suitable HW...

BPry — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 02:34:24 GMT

@LCMember4427,

This is a conversation that I would generally have with your VAR, especially since your in the EDU market and you're likely able to take advantage of E-Rate and different vendors will give you drastically different discount percentages. Having 32GBs of RAM on a VM-100 is really overkill though, you'll never push that. Minimum memory requirements are just 6.5GB and even a VM-500 only requires 16GB. On Azure the default template assigns a D3 v2 instance primary for CPU and only gives you 14GBs of RAM. On the CPU front just don't do anything dual-socket, you'll get better performance out of a single socket machine.

topic Re: VM-100 under Dell PE2950 - and new suitable HW... in General Topics

VM-100 under Dell PE2950 - and new suitable HW...

Re: VM-100 under Dell PE2950 - and new suitable HW...