Dell's First 4-way Opteron Server

Mon. Oct. 23, 2006

Since we launched the blog in July, several of you have asked for details on our first AMD Opteron servers. The first one that we launched today at Oracle OpenWorld, was the 4-way PowerEdge 6950.

It's built around the Opteron 8200 series of 64-bit dual-core processors (up to 2.8GHz). It supports up to 64GB of 667MHz DDR2 ECC SDRAM, and up to 1.5TB of internal storage via 300GB Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives.

Other features: dual 1,570 watt hot-plug power supplies, dual embedded Gigabit NICs that support load balancing and failover. TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) is supported in Windows Server 2003.

Besides the Windows Server 2003 Standard, Enterprise and x64 versions, it also support 64-bit versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Novell/SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. For customers interested in virtualization, the 6950 is certified to run VMware.

In this vlog, the lead engineer of the 6950, Belayneh Million walks through these details and more. Ogg Theora format video here.

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Note: Due to technical difficulties of playing the videos in Firefox, I had to split this post into 2 separate so both videos would play in both browsers. My apologies for the inconvenience.

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Only published comments... Monday, October 23, 2006 03:00 PM
by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger
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Paul R said:
VMWare is telling us that the 6950 is not yet supported.  What is the official word?
October 27, 2006 9:32 AM
balacs said:
It is supported now. check http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_systems_guide.pdf
October 31, 2006 10:07 AM
Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger said:

Paul R.: Sorry for the dropping the ball in terms of a response to you. Balacs is right— ESX Server 3.x is certified on the PowerEdge 6950. I had checked with the server development team about VMware certification before I referenced it in the post.

Based on additional feedback from the team, the 6950 has been VMware certified since September. For more information, you can download PDFs of the 6950 Spec Sheet or the latest rev of the Systems Compatibility Guide for ESX Server 3.x.

November 1, 2006 12:28 PM

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