IBM's blade with embedded VMware Server

IBM has presented its first blade server with an embedded hypervisor at its stand in Hall 2 of CeBIT. At the BladeCenter HS21 XM, IBM has integrated VMware's ESX Server 3i on a 4GB flash drive. This new product will allow customers to consolidate multiple servers on one blade, thus saving time and space. The package also includes IBM's Director system management software. The HS21 XM (Extended Memory) works with Intel's dual or quad-core Xeon processors with up to 3GHz.

The focus in the development of this blade server was on virtualisation. It has twice as much RAM onboard as the HS21 – 32 GB. Up to four hard drives can be installed to offer up to 587.2GB of storage. Like the System x 3850 M2 rack server announced in September, the HS21 XM uses the fourth generation of the X chipset, eX4. The x3850 M2 will also be sold with ESX Server 3i. (Nikolai Zotow)

(trk)