Reading storagereview.com, I stumbled onto the new Dell VRTX server. They do a fairly good job of describing the server in their review, but there are some additional features that will interest the STH audience:
On the surface, the Dell VRTX looks like a four-node Dell c6220 welded to a 25 slot disk chassis. All told, it's 4U and holds four dual Xeon E5 compute nodes with 24 DIMMs each. Those are great specifications, but the really exciting part is the level to which they have virtualized the internal wiring:
The VRTX has eight PCIe3 slots, but you get to decide how to allocate them. All four of the nodes are wired to a pair of programmable PCIe swithes, and you can use the web UI to allocate up to four PCIe slots to any given node.
The VRTX has up to 25 SAS-only disk slots, but all of them run through a SAS expander and to a very unique shared RAID card based on an LSI 2208 chip and SR-IOV. You can use the web UI to allocate any or all disks to any node, and you can even share disks across nodes (shared SAS) for clustering purposes. Having just one RAID card shared across four nodes will definitely limit throughput, but will make clustering a breeze.
Even the Gigabit ports are configured to use either highly available pass-through like a blade chassis or internal switching, with up to four ports per node and eight total ports out the back.
lastly, each node has a pair of SD cards designed for redundant copies of a VM operating system. That means a total of 25 SAS disks, 8 SAS/SATA disks, and 8 SD cards/disks per server.
All in all, this is a great server for a small (but very advanced) VM cluster. That said, you probably won't go rushing out to buy one. While we pay $750 for a working Dell c6100 and then dream of turning it into the perfect VM cluster and storage server, fulfilling that dream with a Dell VRTX will cost you at least $15K for a stripped down server and around $45K for a fully populated one.
On the surface, the Dell VRTX looks like a four-node Dell c6220 welded to a 25 slot disk chassis. All told, it's 4U and holds four dual Xeon E5 compute nodes with 24 DIMMs each. Those are great specifications, but the really exciting part is the level to which they have virtualized the internal wiring:
The VRTX has eight PCIe3 slots, but you get to decide how to allocate them. All four of the nodes are wired to a pair of programmable PCIe swithes, and you can use the web UI to allocate up to four PCIe slots to any given node.
The VRTX has up to 25 SAS-only disk slots, but all of them run through a SAS expander and to a very unique shared RAID card based on an LSI 2208 chip and SR-IOV. You can use the web UI to allocate any or all disks to any node, and you can even share disks across nodes (shared SAS) for clustering purposes. Having just one RAID card shared across four nodes will definitely limit throughput, but will make clustering a breeze.
Even the Gigabit ports are configured to use either highly available pass-through like a blade chassis or internal switching, with up to four ports per node and eight total ports out the back.
lastly, each node has a pair of SD cards designed for redundant copies of a VM operating system. That means a total of 25 SAS disks, 8 SAS/SATA disks, and 8 SD cards/disks per server.
All in all, this is a great server for a small (but very advanced) VM cluster. That said, you probably won't go rushing out to buy one. While we pay $750 for a working Dell c6100 and then dream of turning it into the perfect VM cluster and storage server, fulfilling that dream with a Dell VRTX will cost you at least $15K for a stripped down server and around $45K for a fully populated one.
Last edited:
. It's still a pretty impressive beast. Remember that VSAN requires a 300% hit on disks so to share say 6x1tb you need at least 18 of them across 3 hosts - that adds up. Also this thing does shared SAS across all 4 nodes - 2 active/active I've seen a lot of but not 4.