Whitepaper: How Dell IT Uses Virtualization to Enable Test and Development

Dell published a very interesting (but just 7-pages long) whitepaper about their use of VMware ESX Server to manage company’s complex software development and testing cycle:


Dell IT has implemented virtualization by using ESX Server to support more than 1,000 test and development environments on fewer than 100 physical servers.

The Dell IT virtualization server farm was standardized on Dell PowerEdge 6650 servers.

These servers each have four Intel Xeon processors, 16 GB of RAM, two Emulex host bus adapters for connection to the back-end storage area network (SAN), and four Intel Gigabit Ethernet2 network interface cards (NICs) for network connections. One NIC is dedicated for access to the ESX Server service console, one is dedicated for the VMware VMotion™ feature, and the remaining two are teamed and dedicated for use by the VMs.
The SAN is a Dell/EMC CX700 storage array, with most of the VM disk files residing on RAID-5 logical units.

All servers in the farm run VMware ESX Server 2.5. The servers are divided into groups of 20 for manageability, but they share the same SAN and are managed by a single PowerEdge 2650 server
running VMware VirtualCenter 1.2…

Download the whitepaper at source.

I wonder how happy Dell could be now with VMware Infrastructure 3 and new LabManager 2.4.