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I have an HP ProLiant ML350 G6 that I want to use with Hyper-V Server 2012 to host up to 9 VM's.

The server has this specs:

  • 1 x Intel Xeon E5606 2.13GHz LGA1366 (the motherboard supports 2 CPU's, but has only one at this moment)
  • RAM: 12GB DDR3 Triple Channel (18 slots, 3 used, 15 available)

This are the VM's I'll need:

  • 3 x Linux Servers (Debian), mostly for Document Management System (Apache, PostegreSQL, File Storage). One is for production and 2 for development;
  • 1 x company web server - Windows Server. 2 SQL Server instances, IIS and Tomcat;
  • 2 x Windows Server for development (IIS+SQL Server);
  • 3 x test machines (Windows XP, 7 & 8). Just for software testing\debugging

So, in total I need 9 VM's. But:

  • One of the Linux Servers will only be needed for a couple of month and will be shutdown then.
  • The 3 test machines will only be running when needed.

I need to upgrade the server's RAM. That's a fact. And I'm thinking in adding more 24GB of DDR3, that makes a total of 36GB RAM.

My concern is the CPU. Here are the detailed specs from Intel: http://ark.intel.com/products/52583

It's a quad-core without HT (just 4 threads) at 2.13GHz. Can he take care of all the VM's? If not, what's the best upgrade option, upgrade to a better CPU or add a second Xeon E5606?

Thanks in advance :)

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  • Can not be answered. Nothing says how much load the CPU will get. Document Management System is nice, bu may be 100 people hitting it, or 2. Our sharepoint is "mostly dead" as we mostl do not use it (as in: we work). THe company web server similar - what does that mean?
    – TomTom
    Apr 15, 2013 at 15:16
  • is any of this already running in some form or another?
    – tony roth
    Apr 15, 2013 at 15:21
  • @TomTom: Sorry for the lack of info. This is a small office, with 16 employees. I called "company web server" for the server running all web apps: our intranet (ASP.NET\IIS\MSSQL), JIRA (Tomcat\MSSQL), our Bugtracker (very lightweight ASP.NET\IIS\MSSQL) and Subversion Edge.
    – CSeven
    Apr 15, 2013 at 15:32
  • @Tony roth: yes. I already have the 2 dev Linux servers, 1 dev Windows Server and the 3 test machines on another machine on Hyper-V (Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard). But know, I'm thinking in using this ProLiant to host all those VM's and add the 2 production environments (Linux Server and Windows Web Server) wich have dedicated machines, and more 2-3 test machines, all in this ProLiant ML350 G6.
    – CSeven
    Apr 15, 2013 at 15:35

2 Answers 2

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It's a crappy CPU... It is a hyperthreaded CPU, so you will see 8 threads, but it is at the bottom of the Westmere line. So it's not a particularly fast solution. You may want the second CPU for more headroom. Add it if you run into problems...

In addition, with a single CPU, only half of the RAM slots will be available to you. Keep that in mind as you plan memory expansion.

You may no mention of storage. Be sure to run with a battery-backed (BBWC) or flash-backed (FBWC) cache unit on the RAID controller.

Also see: ML350 G6 Quickspecs

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  • Thanks for the answer. The CPUS does not support Hyper-Threading. It has only 4 cores and 4 threads. No HT! ark.intel.com/products/52583 The RAM slots are no problem. I only need 9 slots to have the 36GB, and 9 are half the slots the motharboard has. We currently have a Desktop with an Intel Q9505 @ 2.83GHz (4 cores\4 threads), and it runs well 5 VM's on Hyper-V. But, most of the machines are test machines, wich have low usage most of the time. I don't know if the Xeon can take the 5 VM's from this Q9505 and add some more production critical environments..
    – CSeven
    Apr 15, 2013 at 15:50
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Whether or not the hardware will run all that, running production systems on a single virtualisation system alongside test and development systems which are going to be powered up and down fairly sporadically sounds like a bad idea to me.

  • You have no resilience - you are putting a lot of your businesses eggs in one basket.
  • Testing and development could easily impact on production performance.

By all means virtualise your dev and test systems for flexibility or cost savings, but virtualisation for critical production systems should just be for resilience in my opinion, never for cost saving.

If you had a couple of extra servers running Hyper-V that you could cluster, I would say go for it, but if you had the budget for that I guess you wouldn't be asking this question.

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  • thanks for your opinion. I work on a small company, that needs to cut some costs. We have a very high power consumption, and need to do something about that. Our main server (Domain Controller, AD, Exchange) will stay on a dedicated server. We have 3 more servers running: a desktop with Hyper-V running 5 test\dev VM's, 1 Linux Server (production) and 1 web server(production). The idea is to put all this in just one server (the better of the 3), which is this HP ML350 G6.
    – CSeven
    Apr 15, 2013 at 17:11
  • The production environments that have dedicated machines and we are thinking to virtualize are not very usage intensive. We have a CRM mostly used by 2 persons, the employee portal only used to submit the vacations, the bug tracker that although is the most used app it0s very lightweight and Jira for project management (used by 5-6 persons max.). The Document Management System is used by everyone, but does not have an intensive usage during the day, just occasionally when someone need to submit a new document and search an old one.
    – CSeven
    Apr 15, 2013 at 17:15

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