It’s a common practice by some vendors trying to accumunate server virtualization with blade technology.
At the moment blades can only help on physical consolidation, adding nothing new to current virtualization technologies.
SearchServerVirtualization finally published a critic to this forced pair:
…these efforts haven’t been enough to convince Rod Lucero, CTO of the Minnesotan VMware consultancy VMPowered, to recommend blade servers to customers undertaking large-scale virtualization and consolidation projects.
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The big problem with blades, Lucero said, is the limited number of network interface cards (NICs) you can attach to a blade — “two, and that’s it,” he said, although some newer blade systems are starting to support more.
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Lucero’s other gripe with blades is that they are often sold diskless, thus requiring the blades to boot from SAN – a less-than-perfect process.
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If you are going to go with blades, you’re best off buying them fully populated…he’s often seen companies invest heavily in a sparsely populated blade chassis, only to find that they don’t really need the extra capacity down the road…
Read the whole article at source.