If you were going to build a blade server for virtual machines from the ground up, what would it look like? That's the question we posed to the blade engineering team.  The ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade was their answer.

Looking at current server designs through the lens of virtualization, they found bottlenecks everywhere they looked.  In order for virtual servers to take advantage of the performance potential of quad-core processors, they need lots of other resources, specifically; memory, I/O and flexible storage. 

First, our engineers doubled the memory to 16 slots and supported up to 8Gb DIMMs.  That delivered 128Gb of memory per blade to divide up across multiple processor cores.  Second, they built in 10Gb network connections, plus the ability to expand to up to 8 connections per blade.  That means plenty of I/O to support VMware channels like motion, backup and production.  For storage, they felt flexiblity was the key because there are many different customer priorities for virtualizations - from performance to capacity to simplicity.  The BL495c offers an incredible array options to connect to different types of external, shared storage plus it's the first HP blade to support high-performance, energy efficienct solid state drives. Their final step was to keep the small size so you could consolidate as much physical hardware as possible.  That means you can pack 16, ProLiant BL495c virtualization blades in one enclosure versus the 8 or fewer possible with other blades that have similar features.

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