BL685c G5's are full height so how can you compare the amount of Ram you can pack in to them to the Half Height boxes . Using SSD's clearly makes a difference. In the BL495c you are halving the size, halving the CPU's but keeping the same number of RAM slots?
Um, why on earth would you care about the storage on the VM host? We're using 15k RPM RAID 1 disks at the moment, and I'm now thinking about booting directly from the FC SAN instead.
ESX doesn't require SSD's. The bottleneck isn't in the hypervisor itself AFAIK - as once the host has booted it's operating in RAM - plus the host OS (ESX) is so tiny it's sort of pointless using SSD's.
If your that bothered used ESXi (onboard) - sorted.
See:
http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html
:-)
Full ACK, the 495s are half height. The two (instead of three) mezzazines gave it away - and the Photo on the HP website: http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliant-bl/c-class/495c-g5/index.html
very neat little thing, indeed.
Go, definitly GO!
Really, an Opteron based blade with samsung SSD instead of simply booting from SAN?
I'm pretty sure I'll stick with Xeon and SAN for these configurations since there just doesn't seem to be a reason to bother.
Do you really want to gamble on buying 50 or more dual processor blades that use a processor that has a high risk of not being able to upgrade the processors at least once before replacing the blades? I just don't trust AMD to be able to continue their semiconductor design division. That and the fact that they're so quick to release something new these days that they seem to be willing to push just about ANYTHING out the door.
AMD will be a terrible loss to the technology world, but hopefully there will be some new x86 upcomers.