Interested in doing some serious virtualization on Cisco's new UCS C-Series line of servers? Seriously, why would'nt you be.  Cisco's UCS C460 M2 server supports up to 4 intel E7-4800 processors — these are 10 core procs people — and up to 1tb of memory. Thats 40 cores in 4 RU!

I am eager to get one of these servers, or even one or the two proc models into our lab and test them out. I have been hearing great things about them and think they would be perfect virtualization servers for our non-production infrastructure where we seem to have at least 6 or 7 different QA environments. Plus Vmware and Cicso partnered together on these things.

But slow your roll cowboy, with Vmware's recent licensing announcement regarding Vsphere 5 and vRam limitations, it would take 11 Enterprise plus licenses to utilize 1tb of memory. At 3 to 4k per license you are talking about 40k in licensing for one server. Nasty!

Enter the alternatives in the virtualization world. Citrix ZenServer and Redhat (RHEV-M). Hell I'll even mention Microsoft's Hyper-V.  However, to move to a different technology you need to be able to get your Vmware vms off of ESX and onto your new virtualization flavor of choice.

Here is how to do it in XenServer. Note that I have not tried this in the lab yet, but trust me i will. I will also do the same with RHEV-M, its its only $750 per socket per year.

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX116603

Sure the alertnatives are not as advanced as Vmware ESX right now, but they making improvements slowly but surely, and I am sure that the recent Vmware licensing announcements are only going to bring more potential customers to other virtualization vendors which will only help to further mature their products.

Find out more about the Cicso USC C-Series via the link below

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/ps10265/ps10493/c_series_comparison.html