Advantages of Dell PowerEdge 2950 Two-Socket Servers Over Hewlett-Packard Proliant DL 585 G2 Four-Socket Servers for Virtualization

There is a lot of debate these days around what is the optimal hosting platform for a virtualization deployment. Most of this debate is centered around the decision to deploy either two-socket or four-socket building blocks as the basis of the infrastructure. In order to illustrate the advantages of using two-socket servers for virtualization over four-socket servers, a test was conducted with VMware® Infrastructure 3 on the Dell™ PowerEdge™ 2950 and the HP ProLiant DL585 G2. The results of these tests show that three PowerEdge 2950 two-socket servers can provide up to 44 percent more performance, 57 percent more performance per watt and a 95 percent average advantage in price/performance than two HP ProLiant DL585 G2 four-socket servers.

Another stumbling block to the adoption of one platform over another is the node count and the perceived complexity of managing more nodes in a virtualized farm. With the maturity of VMware’s management stack in VMware Infrastructure 3 and in particular with Distributed Resource Scheduler, a new paradigm of pooled resource management is possible. Large farms of servers faced issues with complexity in the past, but the policy-based management capabilities of VMware Infrastructure 3 greatly reduce these administrative issues. This then enables the further acceptance of farms of smaller, lower cost building blocks, such as the Dell PowerEdge 2950, as the preferred solution for virtualization deployments.