I'll start (as I often do with negatively titled posts) by saying that I love HP kit. No I'm not being sarcastic, back when I was a support guy I actually resigned from a place because they were going to switch their server vendor of choice away from HP. But for fucks sake, this BL495c "virtualization blade" business is _really_ getting on my nerves. Rather than explain, help me out by doing the following:
1. Google "HP Virtualization Blade"
2. Ignore Mike's #1 rank in the results (nice job Mike, how the fuck did you take top spot from HP themselves in under 1 day :D).
3. 4 or 5 results down you should see "HP ProLiant BL495c G5 Server Blade - product overview". Hit that link.
4. On the resulting page, ignore all the marketing bullshit and cast your eyes over the "Support" section of links to the right of the blade image.
5. Open the "OS support" link in a new tab. Change to that tab, and hit the "Vmware" link.
6. Go back to the main product overview page, and open the "Software & Drivers" link in another new tab.
Or if you're too lazy, have a look here and here.
Now am i going blind, or is there a complete lack of VMware support for this "virtualization blade"? Thanks for that HP. Now guys like me have to fend off a barrage of enquiries from support and management asking "why aren't you looking at the HP virtualization blade?". Ironically, Citrix XenServer 5.0 is listed as supporting the BL495c... is anyone even using that? Even if there was VMware support, good luck with using that 10GbE outside of the chassis - there isn't a 10GbE switch available for the C-class yet. And let's not ignore the other touted feature, SSD. As Mike points out in his post, disks in blades are next to useless anyway (although in my mind the future is PXE rather than embedded).
No doubt the VMware support and 10GbE switches will come in time, but until then HP should withdraw the marketing BS. It doesn't do them any favours, and no doubt posts like this will just serve as ammo for their competitors. I look forward to the day when I won't have to write such posts in the first place!