The HP ProLiant BL495c with Virtual Connect Flex-10 flexible networking adapters is a beneficial platform for VMware View implementations. The server includes virtualization friendly features such as large memory capacity, a small footprint, room for additional mezzanine cards and 8 processing cores. The BL495c ships standard with a pair of Virtual Connect Flex-10 network adapters. Virtual Connect Flex-10 is the world's first technology to divide and fine-tune 10Gb Ethernet network bandwidth at the server edge. It carves the capacity of a 10Gb Ethernet connection into four NIC ports and adds the unique ability to fine-tune each connection to adapt to your virtual server channels and workloads on-the-fly. The effect of using Flex-10 is a dramatic reduction in the number of modules required to uplink outside of the enclosure while still maintaining full redundancy across the service console, VMkernel and virtual machine (VM) networks. This translates to a lower cost infrastructure with fewer management points and cables that can still achieve a per server increase in bandwidth.

This paper is for decision makers that are familiar with and interested in VMware View as a desktop replacement strategy. An understanding of networking and fibre channel infrastructure and how they interact with HP Virtual Connect technologies, virtualization benefits and techniques, VMware software, and datacenter practices is recommended.