Dell PowerEdge R715 ( R815 ) and ESXi 5.5 Stability

We had some initial problems with vSphere ESXi 5.5 on the Dell PowerEdge R715, that led to PSOD with normal load.

The Hypervisor HW was running with the same settings on ESXi 5.1 with no glitches.

We have not 100% identified the root problem, but after reading various blogs regarding best practice and other tunes, we have reached a stable setup. A setup I will share here.

Always have the firmware on your hypervisors at the current level, unless there is a very specific reason otherwise. Without further ado, here is our configuration.

Dell PowerEdge R715 ( Properly also PowerEdge R815 as they share chipset and BIOS version )

– BIOS version : 3.2.1
Processor settings
| HyperTransport Technology : HT3
| HT Assist : Enabled
| Virtualization Technology : Enabled
| DMA Virtualization : Enabled
| DRAM Prefetcher : Enabled
| Hardware Prefetch Training … : Enabled
| Hardware Prefecther : Enabled
| Execute Disable : Enabled
| Number of Cores per Processor : All
| Core Performance Boost Mode : Enabled
| Processor HPC Mode : Enabled
| C1E : Disabled

Power Management
| Power Management : Maximum Performance

– 2 X AMD Opteron 6348
– 2 X Dual 10 Gb Broadcom
– 1 X Quad 1 Gb Broadcom

– Broadcom firmware / driver : 7.8.53 / 2.2.4f.v55.3 ( SSH and ‘ethtool -i vmnicX’ )

VMware ESXi, 5.5.0, 1746974

The above configuration is running rock steady with normal load. “Normal” in our environment is 25% CPU and 75% Memory usage per hypervisor.

Thanks for reading!