PERC6 vs SAS6iR

[Patrick_Fischer at Dell.com]

Brand new news:

Today, VMware is taking another step towards making virtualization
ubiquitous by announcing that VMware ESXi will be available for download
at no cost as of the week of July 28, 2008.

--------------------------------------
Note! At the moment it is not supportet to use vmotion between esxi and
esx. Vmware is working on it with high priority. Maybe this makes the
descision easier for you.

The ESX 3.5 based on RHEL3.

Vmotion and storage vmotion and backup with the vmware appliance I've
done with ESXi without having problems. DRS and HA not tested by my
side.
But also only the installable version tested not the embedded.

-----Original Message-----
From: Sean Dilda [mailto:sean at duke.edu] 
Sent: Mittwoch, 23. Juli 2008 13:51
To: Fischer, Patrick
Cc: linux-poweredge-Lists
Subject: Re: PERC6 vs SAS6iR

Patrick_Fischer at dell.com wrote:
> Why you doesn't choose the R805 with ESXi (32 MB installed ESX on a SD
card (only difference, more secure and without a service console)? So
you need no disks and no raid controller?

Good question.  I went into this looking heavily at ESXi, and I'm still 
considering it.  However, my Dell Systems Consultant (when asked) said 
that all of his customers with setups that actually use the Enterprise 
license from VMware (HA, VMotion, etc) are using ESX, whereas they're 
only seeing ESXi bought by sites that want one, maybe two ESX boxes with

no VMotion or HA.

I also spent some time looking at VMware forums where some people 
indicate they've seen stability problems with ESXi when it comes to HA 
and DRS.   This all makes me think I should wait some on ESXi.

Unfortunately, I've yet to be able to directly talk to someone who has 
used ESXi in our kind of setup to know how it really works in
production.

This is a shame since I know RHEL3 should be EOL by the time this 
hardware goes out of warranty, and that makes me nervous.

> If you need disks choose the Perc6 because it is a real HW raid
controller which supports raid 6.
> The SAS 6ir only supports raid 0 and 1, less cache memory, not the
features as the perc 6. But if you only have 2 internal disks with a
raid 1 the 6 IR is more than enough.
> 

Thanks.  That's really useful info.