Question about servers and setting up a hypervisor

rockstar81

I am having a bit of trouble getting my head around blade servers vs traditional servers.

For example if I had a physical traditional server I could install a hypervisor on it - hyper v, esxi, xen server etc then use tools to create the vms within.

With a blade server I can't see in my head how to do this as I have never worked on one. I am
Having major brain freeze when thinking about this - can anyone please give me some advice.

Essendon

A blade's no different when it comes to installing a hypervisor. You'd use a remote management tool such as iLO (for HP servers), DRAC (for Dell servers), KVM (for other servers) etc to be virtually seated in front of the server, then you'd attach an ISO to the blade's virtual DVD drive, fire it up and you're on your way to installing a hypervisor. Everything's almost the same as a rackmount server. Some things are done slightly differently, such as assigning networking and storage. For example in HP servers you have something called Virtual Connect that lets you assign virtual devices to the blades. Makes sense now?

PurpleIT

Although not a perfect analogy, a blade is just a small rack-mounted server... the chassis is the rack and you just put a bunch of servers in it.

In reality, there are several differences, many of them related to the storage and networking side of things (as Essendon pointed out), but for the purposes of your question a blade is just a physical server. Install the OS/hypervisor and let it do its thing.