Cisco, VMware: Cisco UCS B200-M1 VMware Consolidation Ratio
We have had our new Cisco UCS blades in production for a while now, but have just completed the migration of VMs from our old cluster to UCS recently. I knew going in that the 1/2 width blades were powerful enough but we were only able to order them with 48gigs of RAM. I had hoped that would hold us until next year when we could get more hardware in. It is unlikely, but we might just barely scrape by.
There are a total of 7 blades in our VMware environment, but only 5 of those are dedicated to our main HA/DRS cluster. That gives us ~240 gigs of RAM for the main cluster. Currently, I am seeing a VM consolidation ratio of about 24 VMs (virtual machines) per B200-M1 blade. The limitation here is definitely the RAM. The CPU itself is less than 25% utilized per blade. Below is a screenshot of a B200-M1 host in our cluster.
Cisco UCS B200-M1 VM Ratio
Notes: The VMs running on the above host are
| VM Count | Host OS |
| 15 | Windows 2003 |
| 1 | Windows Xp |
| 8 | RedHat Linux |
Operating system utilization
It would be interesting to know what the typical allocation of RAM per VM is.
DR said this on May 24, 2010 at 4:22 pm
Updated with a screenshot of requested information. Doesn’t show all the servers but lists both windows and Linux.
Kevin Goodman said this on May 24, 2010 at 4:35 pm
[...] the rest here: Cisco, VMware: Cisco UCS B6620 VMware Consolidation Ratio … Tags: and-linux, b6620, between, cisco-ucs, hardware, linked, linux, virtualization-, ware-tags, [...]
Cisco, VMware: Cisco UCS B6620 VMware Consolidation Ratio … | Wordpress Blog Hosting said this on May 26, 2010 at 4:26 pm
How is TPS doing? To get more out of your RAM you might want to make ESX use regular 4k pages instead of 2MB large pages by setting mem.allocguestlargepage to 0. This should permanently improve TPS savings significantly at a tiny (for us unmeasureable) performance impact.
If the host really does get under severe memory pressure, it should however break the large pages down into small pages again.
See http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1021095.
orz said this on May 27, 2010 at 8:13 am
[...] So a few days ago, I put out a post on the VMware Virtual Machine consolidation ratio I saw on our Cisco B200-M1 blades. This post will go over the same for full width B250-M1 [...]
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