OFF TOPIC RANT MODE: ON I like Dell. Over the years I've owned several dozen Dell systems, including notebooks, desktops and servers. So naturally, when it came time to spec out a new server for the exo.performance.network Web site, I went with what I know and bought a shiny new PowerEdge 2950. The 2950 is a sweet box. Our unit is tricked-out with 8x 2.66GHz 45nm Xeon cores, 8GB of RAM and 1.2TB of usable disk s OFF TOPIC RANT MODE: ONI like Dell. Over the years I’ve owned several dozen Dell systems, including notebooks, desktops and servers. So naturally, when it came time to spec out a new server for the exo.performance.network Web site, I went with what I know and bought a shiny new PowerEdge 2950.The 2950 is a sweet box. Our unit is tricked-out with 8x 2.66GHz 45nm Xeon cores, 8GB of RAM and 1.2TB of usable disk space in a six-disk RAID configuration. It’s powerful and also deceptively sleek – the entire unit fits in just 2U of rack space, saving us on co-location costs. Unfortunately, it’s also useless for any kind of server consolidation/virtualization tasks. That’s because the unit ships with a pair of integrated Broadcom NetExtreme II gigabit Ethernet NICs, the most virtualization-unfriendly NICs on the planet.Our original plan was to run SQL Server on the bare iron using Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 edition while hosting our Web site (which includes some proprietary 32-bit ASP.NET components) in a Windows Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 virtual machine running the 32-bit version of said OS.However, after a week of struggling to get the NetExtreme II adapters to maintain the Web site’s connectivity (the virtual machine would randomly drop its connection and go “deaf” every few hours, requiring a VM reboot), we had to scrap our plans and instead run the Web site code directly on the Host OS (a process that involved reconfiguring the 64-bit IIS service to run32-bit worker processes – i.e. UGLY!). In the end, we got the site up and running sans virtualization (see for yourself at www.xpnet.com), but I’ve now been soured on Dell as a server vendor. Not only was their technical support entirely unhelpful (basically, they passed the buck to Broadcom, even though the adapter is integrated with their hardware), we could find no mention of the problem in any Dell or Broadcom knowledge base entries or support articles. Yet a search on Google yields copious examples of customers encountering the very same problem with this, and similar, Dell servers.Bottom Line: If you’re looking to consolidate servers through virtualization, buy HP..or IBM…or Sun. Anyone but Dell. And stay away from Broadcom NICs! You’ll thank me for it…OFF TOPIC RANT MODE: OFF Software DevelopmentSmall and Medium Business