I have vSphere 4.x environment that has have IBM 3650's and half B200M2 (One cluster being made up of the 3650's and one cluster being made up of the B200M2's). The IBM machines are 2 socket quad core with 34GB's of memory and the Cisco are 2 socket 6 core with 48GB's of memory. The workloads on the IBM and Cisco ESXi hosts are the same. Mostly Windows 2003 and 2008 machines. On the IBM machines I get around 1GB's to 2GB's of shared common memory (Shared Common memory - Amount of machine memory that is shared by all powered-on virtual machines and vSphere services on host) on each ESXi host. On the Cisco machines I get around 15MB's on each ESXi host. Considering that is one of the great features of VMware (the sharing of memory) why is there such a huge disparity between the machines? Is it because the Cisco blades are NUMA machines? Is there a setting I'm missing? That is a huge difference. I don't regret getting the UCS stuff as I like it but this is big feature of VMware that is not working with the UCS.
