How do blade servers work with storage, hypervisor, and VM

[tJuggernaut29]

So i have set up a few normal servers, but i got a deal on a blade server and am trying to figure it out.

 

some newbie questions:

 

how does storage work exactly with a blade server? Like if i have a 4 blade server, Dell C6100, it has 12 drive bays on the backplane, but only one blade has a raid card

so do i only install the hypervisor once and it manages all 4 blades?

or is the hypervisor installed on to each blade separately?

and then if i only have 1 raid card, and say i set it up into a raid 5 pool, do i then just split up the pool with vm allocation to each blade?

and if i set up a vm, how do i decide which blade for it to use?

im probably going to use either citrix xen server 7, or XCP-ng

 

thanks

[Electronics Wizardy]

This of this system asa 4 computers in one box. All the nodes operate seperatly.

 

2 hours ago, tJuggernaut29 said:

ow does storage work exactly with a blade server? Like if i have a 4 blade server, Dell C6100, it has 12 drive bays on the backplane, but only one blade has a raid card

Normally the drives are split between the nodes, so 3 drives per node.

 

2 hours ago, tJuggernaut29 said:

so do i only install the hypervisor once and it manages all 4 blades?

or is the hypervisor installed on to each blade separately?

You need to install a os on all 4 systems separately.

 

2 hours ago, tJuggernaut29 said:

and then if i only have 1 raid card, and say i set it up into a raid 5 pool, do i then just split up the pool with vm allocation to each blade?

Your gonna have a drive controller on all nodes. Normally you can also plug the drives directly onto the board and use the onboard sata.

 

Probably have a boot drive for each node, then Id setup something like ceph for a distributed filesystem.

 

2 hours ago, tJuggernaut29 said:

and if i set up a vm, how do i decide which blade for it to use?

 

Your hypervisor will let you pick the node the vm is running on.

 

I wll also note these systems will pull a lot of power, so Id stay away from it in home use.

[Needfuldoer]

I think the C6100 breaks the drive backplane up into chunks, so each node gets either three or six drives of its own to play with (depending on whether it's the 12x3.5" or 24x2.5" chassis). Put the chassis' service tag into dell.com/support and you'll be able to get a PDF of the manual.

 

These systems aren't really "blades". It's four half-width, 1U nodes in a 2U chassis. Each one still operates independently, oblivious to the fact that it's got conjoined siblings.

 

Dell blades go in an M1000e, FX2/FX2S, or VRTX chassis. They'll have all the big datacenter goodies like centralized platform management, shared storage, and internal networking.

[tJuggernaut29]

update on this. ended up picking up 3 of these 4 blade servers

 

There are 12 drives on the backplane, and 4 blades. Each blade just gets 3 drives. Each blade has its own networking, drives, power button etc.

Basically it is 4 separate servers that only share a power supply and only take up 2U total - so good on space efficiency

You install the hypervisor separately on each blade.

 

Why was there only one raid card in one blade? Turns out they pulled the raid cards out when server was decommissioned. Each blade needs its own raid card