Mike’s Blog

Ah, the dreaded part 2 of the series.

I ordered my test system from Dell on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008, and the box shipped on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008. I am excitedly waiting for it.

The box I ordered is to test out the I/O performance for the mail server virtualization, the config is:

• Quad Core Xeon E5420, 2.5Ghz, 2×6MB L2 Cache, 1333Mhz FSB
• 16GB (8×2GB FBDIMM)
• Quantity 4 146GB, 15K RPM SAS disks
• PERC6/i RAID controller
• Dual Port Intel 1000PT

So, not a huge machine, though not small either. If this works out well, then I’ll order up 8 of them to start the compression of my physical servers into virtual servers.

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With things changing all over the marketplace, virtualization has, again, come to the forefront as the savior of the data center.

And wouldn’t you know, I’d like to save my data center, at least some power and cooling needs.

I have started to review how we use our servers and where we could do combining to save power, cooling, and rack space.  During this installment, I’ll be discussing the usage, and combining, of 3 parts of our network:

• POP/IMAP servers
• Apache based web servers
• SMTP (inbound, delivery, outbound) servers

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