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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, the processors reduce CPU socket-based licensing costs and provide greater VM density. Scaling compute resources with Intel Xeon scalable processors delivers 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, enabling the use of quad-ranked DIMMs to increase overall memory capacity. For general-purpose virtualization solutions, we recommend 2,666 MT/s RDIMMs. You can configure memory in various modes from within the BIOS. To provide an optimized memory performance, the default Optimizer Mode works best for most virtualization use cases. Mirror Mode, Single Rank Spare Mode, and Multi Rank Spare Mode are available for improved reliability and resiliency.
The following table lists the recommended adapters.
Table 5. Recommended network and HBA adapters
Adapter | Purpose |
Intel X710 quad-port 10 GbE Ethernet | Virtual workload and host communication |
QLogic 2692 dual-port 16 Gb FC | FC SAN connectivity for PowerEdge servers in the workload domain that connect to Unity storage |
PowerEdge servers support various BIOS configuration profiles that control the processor, memory, and other options. Dell EMC recommends that you:
The Dell server platforms recommended for Ready Stack for VMware Cloud Foundation, Dell PowerEdge R640 and R740, are configured with specifications similar to their vSAN ReadyNode counterpart servers. If the Dell servers meet or exceed the specifications for their counterpart vSAN ReadyNode server model types, the use of vSAN ReadyNodes is not required. For specification details, see Table 4, Sample configuration: Component specifications.