In this whitepaper titled, "Advantages of Dell PowerEdge 2950 Two Socket Servers over Hewlett-Packard Proliant DL 585 G2 Four Socket Servers for Virtualization", Dell attempts to showcase and compare the advantages of moving to a two socket Dell PowerEdge 2950 over the competitor four socket Proliant DL585 from HP.
Obviously, I read this whitepaper already knowing what the conclusion would be. Afterall, it was written by Dell. I knew the paper would be written based on fact, but the fact of the matter is had the conclusions drawn all been in favor of the HP over the Dell, I suspect that the test would have ended there without a paper being written up and distributed.
Nonetheless, this 16 page paper was a good read. For the most part, I liked the way the tests were developed and implemented.
The paper states:
There is a lot of debate these days around what is the optimal hosting platform for a virtualization deployment. Most of this debate is centered around the decision to deploy either 2 socket or 4 socket building blocks as the basis of the infrastructure. In order to illustrate the advantages of using two-socket servers for virtualization over four-socket servers, a test was conducted with VMware Infrastructure 3 on the Dell PowerEdge 2950 and the HP ProLiant DL585 G2.
The results of these tests show that three PowerEdge 2950 two-socket servers can provide up to 44% more performance, 57% more performance per watt and a 95% average advantage in price / performance than two HP ProLiant DL585 G2 four-socket servers. Another stumbling block to the adoption of one platform over another is the node count and the perceived complexity of managing more nodes in a virtualized farm. With the maturity of VMware’s management stack in VMware Infrastructure 3 and in particular with Distributed Resource Scheduler, a new paradigm of pooled resource management is possible. Large farms of servers faced issues with complexity in the past, but the policy based management capabilities of VMware Infrastructure 3 greatly reduce these administrative issues. This then enables the further acceptance of farms of smaller, lower cost building blocks, such as the Dell PowerEdge 2950, as the preferred solution for virtualization deployments.
The Dell group concludes:
In terms of performance, power consumption, and costs the Dell PowerEdge 2950 two-socket, quad-core servers are a much better solution for virtualization than the HP Proliant DL 585 G2 four-socket dual-core servers. This is shown in the results of the testing with the two-socket virtualization solution from Dell providing up to 44% more performance, 57% more performance per watt and a 95% average advantage in price / performance than the HP four-socket solution.
To check out the entire white paper and how they came to this conclusion, download and read the following white paper.