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The latest Intel SP Skylake generation processors power Dell EMC Ready Stack. With up to 28 cores per CPU and clock speeds of up to 3.6 GHz in the PowerEdge rack servers, you can reduce CPU socket-based licensing costs and achieve greater VM density. Scale compute resources with Intel Xeon scalable processors, delivering a 27 percent increase in processing cores and a 50 percent increase in bandwidth over previous generations of Xeon processors.
The PowerEdge rack server platforms support the RDIMM and Load Reduced DIMM (LRDIMM) memory types. LRDIMM uses an internal buffer to isolate electrical loading from the host memory controller. This buffer and isolation allow the use of quad-ranked DIMM to increase overall memory capacity. For general-purpose virtualization solutions, 2666 MT/s RDIMMs are recommended. You can configure memory in various modes from within the BIOS. Optimizer Mode, the default mode, is recommended for most virtualization use cases to provide an optimized memory performance. Modes such as mirror mode and spare mode are available for improved reliability and resiliency.
The Mellanox CX4 LX 10/25 Gb dual-port Ethernet adapter is the recommended Ready Stack adapter for virtual workload and host communication. The QLogic 2692 Dual Port 16 Gb Fibre Channel Adapter is the recommended adapter for FC SAN storage connectivity.
PowerEdge servers support various BIOS configuration profiles that control the processor, memory, and other options. Dell EMC recommends that you:
This Ready Stack offers a selection of rack servers for compute infrastructure. The following table shows the recommended compute servers.
Table 6. Recommended compute server configurations
Components |
Details |
Server platform models |
PowerEdge R440, R640, R740, or R740xd |
Processors |
1-2 x Intel Xeon SP Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Skylake processors |
Memory (based on the server model) |
1-24 x 2666 MT/s RDIMMs, up to 768 GB of RAM |
|
1-24 x 2666 MT/s LRDIMMs, up to 3 TB of RAM |
Network Adapter |
Mellanox CX4 LX 10/25 Gb Ethernet Network Adapter |
Host Bus Adapter |
QLogic 2692 Dual Port FC Adapter |
Boot Device |
Internal Dual SD Module (IDSDM) |
|
PERC H730p RAID Controller |
OOB server management |
iDRAC9 Enterprise |
Hypervisor |
Windows Server 2016 with Hyper-V |
A high-level summary of common Hyper-V tuning steps includes:
For more information about Hyper-V and Windows Server 2016, see the Microsoft article Virtualization in Windows Server.
We recommend the following best practices for configuring the Hyper-V host and deploying VMs: