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, 2x6MB L2 Cache, 1333Mhz FSB
- 16GB (8x2GB 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.
The power configurator at Dell lists this system as:
- 1.29A (208V), 2.34A (115V) idle
- 1.95A (208V), 3.54A (115V) full usage
So somewhere in the middle will be my power usage.
Current mail servers with higher I/O requirements are:
- greylisting boxes are 2.54A each full load (qty 2)
- outbound boxes are 1.61A each full load (qty 2)
- delivery boxes are 2.11A each full load (qty 2)
Quick math gives us that the total (max) power usage of the old boxes is 12.52A, and the fair usage (max) power of the new boxes (doing division by 3) is 7.08A, or a savings of 5.44A.
I expect to have the server in house on October 6th or 7th.
Once I have done some conversion, I’ll add yet another part to this series, until then, buhbye!