Dell dropped support on XenServer after 5.6. To find out about support for XenServer on the MD-series, you'll want to ask Citrix support.

If you opt for XenServer, you'll want to be sure to buy a support contract from Citrix as Dell will cover the MD's hardware, but most likely they won't offer assistance or support with the XenServer side of anything (even with Gold/Prosupport on the MD-array). This limits you to 'best-effort', which may not be much (especially as they seem to know only Windows and VMware, and very little about other OSes (linux, XenServer, Solaris, etc).

Thanks for the reply. When this happens, it is generally the beginning of the end.

- I have heard from a couple of people that even though the VMWare Essentials package is limited to dual socket processor and 192 GB of RAM, you can purchase 2 licenses and have 4 socket process and 192X2 GB of RAM. Is that correct?

- Other option is Hyper-V. I never wanted to go this path but would really appreciate any experiences with it. Performance and Reliability being the main considerations. I read the Dell whitepaper that using Hyper-V MPIO, it can use the entire 4Gbps bandwidth. That's pretty amazing if it works. Even ESXi can only use 2 paths and a max of 500Mbps each which ends up giving a real-world IO of 100 Mbps for the VM's

VMware's Essentials and Essentials Plus aren't expandable (by adding additional processor licenses) from what I understand (see www.vmware.com/.../compare-kits.html). vCenter Essentials is also limited to being able to manage just 3 hosts from what I remember running into once.

So, you'd have to run 2 vCenters and each run it's own host(s). There wouldn't be any vMotion or anything (not even after shutting down the VM) between the different vCenters. You could set up shared SAN storage between the hosts (as VMFS can safely be shared due to it's folder locking mechanism), but it wouldn't be the smoothest failover or so. This is why Essentials Plus and Standard offer the same features; except that Standard is expandable (and a lot more expensive (it also gives you 8 processors instead of 6)).

If you set up ESXi properly, it can use all 4 ports on a controller on the MD3220i as well. However, it's unlikely that that can push more than about 2Gbit/s to a single virtual disk at any time. This is also why it's smarter to make 2 or more diskgroups and virtual disks; to spread your IO.

To me, Microsoft's Hyper-V (clustering) solution just doesn't seem mature enough yet to consider for production. I'd say that they are maybe at the same level where VMware was with ESX 2.5 or so several years ago. I haven't used it for production for this reason, so maybe someone else can chime in that has production experience with Hyper-V clustering. For test environments (non-clustered), it works decently, but it's still nowhere near VMware's free ESXi offering in ease of use, ease of configuration and capabilities.

Thanks for your detailed reply. Going through the Hyper-V website, it feels that they are still targeting much smaller installs. Who boasts their product for using in test environment??

So I checked the Citrix HCL and it lists MD3220i on it. Also on this document which I found under Dell MD3220i support website,

support.dell.com/.../matrix.zip

it lists Xenserver 5.6 Retail edition.

Do you have the document which does not list it?

Thanks for your help

Nihar

I don't have any good answers to your questions, except that with 14 x 300GB 15k SAS drives I could easily max out 4 x GBE connections on an MD3000i with sequential loads.  I'm assuming you meant 100MBps as well, not 100Mbps which would be dreadful.

The real question that pops in to mind is the Dell 5224 switch that you are using.  The Dell reps say that the 5224 is not support and not capable of support our MD3000i units (we don't have any MD32XXi series units).  Could that be your problem?

Also, we usually deploy two physical switches with 2GBE + 2GBE connections to the MD3000i for 2 dedicated paths.  We then optimize the switches for maximum iSCSI performance.  Are you using a single 5224 for all 4 x GBE connections?

it lists Xenserver 5.6 Retail edition. Do you have the document which does not list it?

Version 5.6 is the last/latest version that Dell seems to support; there is no support matrix that lists the current XenServer version (6.x).

So if you opt to use the latest Citrix version, and there are iSCSI connectivity issues, Dell will verify that the hardware works, but getting them to see what may be wrong with your XenServer's iSCSI configuration or MPIO setup will be limited at best (and you'd have to open a support ticket with Citrix (would require having a support contract with them probably).

hcl.xensource.com/ProductDetails.aspx

It does mention 6.0 here on Citrix site so what you say makes sense. Looks like I might have to stick to ESXi4.1 and live with 4vCPU limitation