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Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 8:50 am Post subject: IBM Blade Servers

Do any of you guys work with a blade server setup?

I've been trying to convince the boss to get rid of our 4 server tower setup and go to blades. I've been looking around on IBM's site and have seen them mention things like "Take 40-50 servers and compress them to 8 blades". Are they really that efficient? If so I'm thinking I might be able to put all my stuff on one.

This is what I'm looking at:

http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=1352064

Quad Core 3.0ghz Xeon with 2 gigs of ram.

I want to get rid of my ISA firewall server, so essentially I would be rolling 3 servers into this one.

1 server runs Exchange/OWA 2003 (This would become exchange 2007 if I got a server loaded with Windows Server 2k3) and GFI Mail Essentials for spam filtering
1 server runs our Deltek Vision software and SQL server 2005, and hosts our company intranet website.
And the final server is just file storage and a print server, and it runs a virtual CD library I put together using Daemon Tools, and it has my tape backup drive.

None of these are under heavy loads the majority of the time. The Vision Server bogs a bit when running reports, but other than that, nothing major. At this particular time there's a max of 20-25 people using these servers, and generally never at the same time, except for Fridays when everyone is submitting time sheets on the Vision server.

So what do you think? Would it be possible for me to roll all this stuff into one server? Or maybe get one of the ones using VMWare and virtualization?

My only other concern really is that currently the Exchange server acts as primary domain controller and DNS server, and the Fileserver is backup DC and DNS. So I might need 2 just for redundancy purposes.

Just for comparison, here's the specs on the servers now:

Exchange Server:

AMD Athlon64 3200+ (2ghz single core)
1 Gig of Ram
75 GB Mirrored Raid (2 Drives)

Vision Server:

Dual AMD Athlon64 1.5ghz
1 Gig of RAM
37 GB SCSI Mirrored Raid (2 Drives)

File Server:

AMD Athlon64 3200+ (2ghz single core)
2 Gigs of RAM
37 GB OS Hard Drive
250 GB Mirrored Raid (2 Drives) for storage

Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 10:01 am Post subject:

A couple things I've seen with the blades. Whether IBM, or HP, you have to remember they are just standard servers, that share a little bit of their architecture (IE power supplies, networking, etc) If you can get by with just one blade, get just a single rackmounted server. Everything else will be a waste. You only see an advantage when you have 3+ servers in a blade center.

The "Replace 50 servers with just 8 blades" has nothing to do with the efficiency of the blades themselves. This is generally refereing to using blades in conjunction with Virtualization of some type, ie vmware. You can share the resources among the different blades when the OS is in a virtual machine. If you are running one blade to one OS, no virtualization, you basically just bought an upgraded rackmount server.

I love them, and find they are great, however with your setup your going to run into a few issues.

"In an ideal world"

ISA firewall, Exchange, and company website all go in the DMZ. Your file, print, and backup servers should be inside the firewall seperating your DMZ from your internal network. With the sharing of resources that makes blades attractive this may be a bit harder to pull off (I don't know how to accomplish it securely).

I assume you are not running that way however, so you might have different issues.

Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 12:49 pm Post subject:

Ahhh.... ok..... I see what you're saying.

As it stands now network is setup like this:

Cable Modem goes to ISA, 2nd NIC on the ISA goes into a switch and all the other servers and client machines hook to that switch.

The ISA just has publishing rules for Exchange and Web servers. I'm not entirely sure how it works to tell you the truth, it was setup before I got here. I dunno if it's basically the same thing as using NAT and port forwarding on a router or not. I think it dynamically opens and closes ports though.

For instance if I go to grc.com and run shields up, it returns there is not a single port open anywhere.... yet I'm running 2 webservers and an email server that are accessible from outside the internal network.