I probably get an email every couple a weeks about this one, not sure why.
E-mails regarding something in Solaris not working on Dell PowerEdge 9th gen servers.
For any device driver related issues with Solaris on x86, the first resource to check if you run in to trouble is the Sun HCL, the 'hardware compatability list'.
Solaris 10 works fine on most Dell boxes, but some need NIC or HBA drivers.
For a Dell 2950 that tells us that Solaris works, from release 11/06 upwards, it also tells us to download the ethernet driver here and the MegaRAID SAS driver here.
NB, the Sun HCL does not mention the new 'III' series 9-gen server yet. I would guess they are working on as Sun and Dell recently partenered to provide better Solaris support. The PERC6 card may need some new drivers.
Showing posts with label hardware. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hardware. Show all posts
Thursday, December 20
Wednesday, April 11
New dual socket AMD system from Dell
Dell just introduced a new two socket AMD Opteron system, the PowerEdge 2970, a system designed to compete with Sun x4200 and the HP DL385 G2.
Fairly similar to the Intel-based PowerEdge 2950 but with AMD procs. Same redundancy with dual psu's, two onboard nic's and the onboard DRAC5 remote management adapter.
Comes default with the 8 slot 2.5" SAS backplane which is nice to see. I'm all in favour of 2.5" drives over 3.5" in small servers. Up to 32Gb RAM, with expensive 4GB DIMMS that is, 32Gb comes in at about $35000 USD :)
Perfect little J2EE application server running Linux.
It's interesting to see the latest trends in that area. A number of our clients, major investment banks, are currently in the middle of Linux migration projects.
One thing I think slowed Linux adaptation in past has been the "32-bit barrier" and the limit it puts on memory allocation. A J2EE app with a maximum heap size of about 1.5Gb isn't very popular. 8 or even 16Gb is not unusual to see on the Solaris/SPARC side.
Now with AMD Opteron processors (and Intel EM64T) and a mature 64-bit Linux environment that problem has gone away. Websphere 6.0.2 runs perfectly on my test machine with 6Gb heap, performance is great.
Actually all but one of our "Linux clients" are moving to AMD machines over Intel Xeon's, HP and Sun AMD based hardware only so far.
One good example is a project that is currently being migrated from a six processor Sun v890 to a HP DL585, they even got a small performance increase.
Sad to see the SPARC's go but fun to see new platforms coming. Linux one one side and Solaris 10 on the other side.
But the SPARC's will be back, the new "rock" SPARC processor just hit silicone and with it's massive coherent memory access space of 256 Tb, the expected number of cores and performance. It will kick some serious ass.
Fairly similar to the Intel-based PowerEdge 2950 but with AMD procs. Same redundancy with dual psu's, two onboard nic's and the onboard DRAC5 remote management adapter.
Comes default with the 8 slot 2.5" SAS backplane which is nice to see. I'm all in favour of 2.5" drives over 3.5" in small servers. Up to 32Gb RAM, with expensive 4GB DIMMS that is, 32Gb comes in at about $35000 USD :)
Perfect little J2EE application server running Linux.
It's interesting to see the latest trends in that area. A number of our clients, major investment banks, are currently in the middle of Linux migration projects.
One thing I think slowed Linux adaptation in past has been the "32-bit barrier" and the limit it puts on memory allocation. A J2EE app with a maximum heap size of about 1.5Gb isn't very popular. 8 or even 16Gb is not unusual to see on the Solaris/SPARC side.
Now with AMD Opteron processors (and Intel EM64T) and a mature 64-bit Linux environment that problem has gone away. Websphere 6.0.2 runs perfectly on my test machine with 6Gb heap, performance is great.
Actually all but one of our "Linux clients" are moving to AMD machines over Intel Xeon's, HP and Sun AMD based hardware only so far.
One good example is a project that is currently being migrated from a six processor Sun v890 to a HP DL585, they even got a small performance increase.
Sad to see the SPARC's go but fun to see new platforms coming. Linux one one side and Solaris 10 on the other side.
But the SPARC's will be back, the new "rock" SPARC processor just hit silicone and with it's massive coherent memory access space of 256 Tb, the expected number of cores and performance. It will kick some serious ass.
Wednesday, February 21
Mixing Dell PowerEdge 1955 and 1855 blades
After looking around the Internet for information regarding mixing Dell PowerEdge 1855 and 1955 blades in one enclosure I found some varying "opinions" whether it works or not.
To get things right.
Yes, it is possible to mix and match any 1855 and 1955 blades in one single enclosure
However, there are two small requirements.
The 1955 blades plug-in during operations just as any 1855 blades would, you get a sensor detect and they power on just fine.
Printout from the DRAC/MC:
To get things right.
Yes, it is possible to mix and match any 1855 and 1955 blades in one single enclosure
However, there are two small requirements.
- The DRAC/MC needs firmware 1.3 or later (everyone should upgrade to 1.3, even if you don't have any 1955 blades).
- You need the digital KVM modules, they rock, get them!
The 1955 blades plug-in during operations just as any 1855 blades would, you get a sensor detect and they power on just fine.
Printout from the DRAC/MC:
[Server Module Power Consumption Table]Cool!
<Slot#> <Server Name> <Blade Type> <Power State> <Current/Max Consumption>
1 Server-1 PE1855 ON 300/300W
2 Server-2 PE1855 ON 300/300W
3 Server-3 PE1855 ON 300/300W
4 Server-4 PE1855 ON 300/300W
5 Server-5 PE1855 ON 300/300W
6 Server-6 PE1855 ON 300/300W
7 Server-7 PE1855 ON 300/300W
8 Server-8 PE1955 ON 304/304W
9 Server-9 PE1955 ON 304/304W
10 Server-10 N/A N/A N/A
Sunday, January 7
Time for HP Proliant?
Now I can't say I've blogged much about HP server, simply because it's not been very exciting hardware. Dell and Sun have always had better products at better prices and have always been better to deal with.
Now recently, especially with the G5 series of it's Proliant line HP have some quite exciting and unique products. The one thing I've always liked with HP is that they've been a long term AMD Opteron supporter. The where the second big server vendor after IBM to launch Opteron based servers. The DL385 was unique at the time and served me well in a previous company I worked for. The following DL585 (4 sockets, 128Gb RAM max and 8x 2.5" SAS slots) is still a pretty ok Oracle server, the G2 version comes with a pretty cool front accessible CPU and memory drawer for easy upgrades and repairs is even better. But price wise it's on par with the Sun x4600, and the x4600 will let you scale to 8-sockets over of the 4-socket DL585.
The Intel equivalent, the DL580 offers front accessible memory access, CPU's are still top lid accessible.
Now with the Intel-based (dual and quad core Xeon 3000, 5000, 5100 and 5300 boxes) machines in the "G5" series we have a few pretty cool new features, the focus on 2.5" SAS drives is nice to see, Sun is going the same way but Dell is clinging on to 3.5" drives (probably to keep the price tag down), some Dell machines can be fitted with a 2.5" backplane (like the PE1950).
The DL360 makes a decent app server with two sockets and up to 32Gb RAM, nice 6 slot SAS backplane and the DL380 adds more PCI I/O and can take up to 8 drives.
Big brother (in the 2-socket famaily) is the ML370, this is a pretty large machine for a 2-socket box, 5U in the rack, but it makes a great VMWare server, loads of local disk (16 SAS slots), loads of I/O and can take a massive 64Gb RAM. Great for stand-alone Oracle deployments as well.
The smallest member in the 300-family is the DL320, pretty standard 1-socket Xeon 3000 machine (3.5" drives though), makes a decent webserver or network appliance.
Ok, now on to the reason I actually started getting excited about HP hardware again.
The recently introduced DL 320s hybrid data server (or "storage server").
It's pretty much the same as the DL320, but the "s" adds some pretty cool stuff. It can take 12 SAS or SATA drives. Which makes it a pretty interesting machine, one could say this is the "HP Thumper", the HP equivalent of the Sun x4500. It's not as big and impressive as the x4500 but it's still interesting. Applications like distributed data mining, data analysis and video processing fits like a glove on this box.
A few bad things about HP, everything is extra. The price you see is not the price you pay. The list price of a normal, say DL380, includes exactly what is listed. You even have to add the second sets of fans to get redundancy. Half the features in the iLO2 (remote management interface) require extra licenses to be activated. I think HP needs to re-think this. As it stands today I would not look at buying HP servers as generic servers, possibly if I have a project that require something only HP can offer (like a DL320s). It simply doesn't make sense financially.
If I want standard server, I go to Dell. If I want business critical servers, I go to Sun. It's as easy as that. If HP can offer competitive pricing I would not hesitate to at least evaluate deploying HP instead of Dell and in some cases Sun boxes.
Now recently, especially with the G5 series of it's Proliant line HP have some quite exciting and unique products. The one thing I've always liked with HP is that they've been a long term AMD Opteron supporter. The where the second big server vendor after IBM to launch Opteron based servers. The DL385 was unique at the time and served me well in a previous company I worked for. The following DL585 (4 sockets, 128Gb RAM max and 8x 2.5" SAS slots) is still a pretty ok Oracle server, the G2 version comes with a pretty cool front accessible CPU and memory drawer for easy upgrades and repairs is even better. But price wise it's on par with the Sun x4600, and the x4600 will let you scale to 8-sockets over of the 4-socket DL585.
The Intel equivalent, the DL580 offers front accessible memory access, CPU's are still top lid accessible.
Now with the Intel-based (dual and quad core Xeon 3000, 5000, 5100 and 5300 boxes) machines in the "G5" series we have a few pretty cool new features, the focus on 2.5" SAS drives is nice to see, Sun is going the same way but Dell is clinging on to 3.5" drives (probably to keep the price tag down), some Dell machines can be fitted with a 2.5" backplane (like the PE1950).
The DL360 makes a decent app server with two sockets and up to 32Gb RAM, nice 6 slot SAS backplane and the DL380 adds more PCI I/O and can take up to 8 drives.
Big brother (in the 2-socket famaily) is the ML370, this is a pretty large machine for a 2-socket box, 5U in the rack, but it makes a great VMWare server, loads of local disk (16 SAS slots), loads of I/O and can take a massive 64Gb RAM. Great for stand-alone Oracle deployments as well.
The smallest member in the 300-family is the DL320, pretty standard 1-socket Xeon 3000 machine (3.5" drives though), makes a decent webserver or network appliance.
Ok, now on to the reason I actually started getting excited about HP hardware again.
The recently introduced DL 320s hybrid data server (or "storage server").
It's pretty much the same as the DL320, but the "s" adds some pretty cool stuff. It can take 12 SAS or SATA drives. Which makes it a pretty interesting machine, one could say this is the "HP Thumper", the HP equivalent of the Sun x4500. It's not as big and impressive as the x4500 but it's still interesting. Applications like distributed data mining, data analysis and video processing fits like a glove on this box.
A few bad things about HP, everything is extra. The price you see is not the price you pay. The list price of a normal, say DL380, includes exactly what is listed. You even have to add the second sets of fans to get redundancy. Half the features in the iLO2 (remote management interface) require extra licenses to be activated. I think HP needs to re-think this. As it stands today I would not look at buying HP servers as generic servers, possibly if I have a project that require something only HP can offer (like a DL320s). It simply doesn't make sense financially.
If I want standard server, I go to Dell. If I want business critical servers, I go to Sun. It's as easy as that. If HP can offer competitive pricing I would not hesitate to at least evaluate deploying HP instead of Dell and in some cases Sun boxes.
Sunday, December 3
Laptops - 3 years ago and today
So I figured it was time to get a new laptop, my old trustworthy Dell Inspiron 8600 has done a great job but it's starting to show it's age, it's actually 3 years old on the day next week (Yes, remembering the exact date you bought your last laptop is weird, I know). My 8600 had a few scratches and marks but it still looks pretty ok. Performance wise it's not to bad, I've been running Open Solaris for the last 18 months and it's been working great, felt fast and snappy. But when it comes to heavy multi tasking, Solaris container and VMWare it's not really keeping up with times.
After browsing the laptop market it was quite clear that getting a Core2 machine was the best option if I wanted performance. I was very tempted to get a cool Acer Ferrari 4006, the price is pretty great now when the 5000-series is just around the corner, but the AMD ML-40 benchmarks put me off, the Core2 totally trash it. Since my old Dell has been working great I went and got a new Dell to replace it. Although I was looking for a smaller machine this time I actually went for pretty much the exact replacement for the 8600, the new Dell Inspiron 6400. Funny thing, the price of the new machine turned out to be pretty much exactly the same as I payed for my old machine.
It's quite nice to be able to boot up a CentOS 4.4 running 10gR2 and still have great performance. Both in the VM and in the host OS.
The one thing I don't like is that the 6400 don't have the pointing stick thingy, just the touch pad. But I'm getting used to it.
After browsing the laptop market it was quite clear that getting a Core2 machine was the best option if I wanted performance. I was very tempted to get a cool Acer Ferrari 4006, the price is pretty great now when the 5000-series is just around the corner, but the AMD ML-40 benchmarks put me off, the Core2 totally trash it. Since my old Dell has been working great I went and got a new Dell to replace it. Although I was looking for a smaller machine this time I actually went for pretty much the exact replacement for the 8600, the new Dell Inspiron 6400. Funny thing, the price of the new machine turned out to be pretty much exactly the same as I payed for my old machine.
| Dell Inspiron 6400 | Dell Inspiron 8600 | |
| CPU | Intel Core2 Duo 2.0Ghz | Intel Pentium M 1.4GHz |
| Memory | 2048Mb | 768Mb |
| Disk | 120Gb 5400rpm | 30Gb 5400rpm |
| Graphics | ATI X1400 128MB | Nvidia Geforce 5250Go |
| Network | 54Mbit wifi + 100Mbit wired | 11Mbit Wifi + 100Mbit wired |
| Optical | DVD+RW | DVD/CD+RW |
| Pointing device | Touchpad | Touchpad / poiting stick |
| Screen | 1680x1050 high gloss | 1680x1050 |
| Weight | 2.8 kg | 3.1 kg |
| Size | A bit smaller | Quite big |
| VMWare speed | Fast | Slow |
It's quite nice to be able to boot up a CentOS 4.4 running 10gR2 and still have great performance. Both in the VM and in the host OS.
The one thing I don't like is that the 6400 don't have the pointing stick thingy, just the touch pad. But I'm getting used to it.
Thursday, November 23
More cores, less space
Dell just started shipping the "mark ii" 9-series boxes capable of taking the new quad-core Intel Xeon processor.
Unfortunately the older 9th generation are not compatible with the new quad core processors. Intel made some last minute design changes to the new chip that required Dell to revise their motherboard designs.
Look out for a "II" symbol on the front of your 9th gen boxes.
Quad-core will be available on the SC1430, 1900, 2900, 1950, 2950 and the 1955 blades.
Performance is said to be up to 60% better than a dual core system, which sort of puts 2-socket machines in "enterprise territory" for the first time. Sure, we got the 8-core Sun T1, but that is a quite niche market machine.
A 8-core Dell PowerEdge 2950 with dual quad core procesors, 8Gb RAM and a pair of 72Gb SAS disks costs just under £6000 ($10kUSD).
I'd love to do some JBoss benchmark on a mk2 1950.
Unfortunately the older 9th generation are not compatible with the new quad core processors. Intel made some last minute design changes to the new chip that required Dell to revise their motherboard designs.
Look out for a "II" symbol on the front of your 9th gen boxes.
Quad-core will be available on the SC1430, 1900, 2900, 1950, 2950 and the 1955 blades.
Performance is said to be up to 60% better than a dual core system, which sort of puts 2-socket machines in "enterprise territory" for the first time. Sure, we got the 8-core Sun T1, but that is a quite niche market machine.
A 8-core Dell PowerEdge 2950 with dual quad core procesors, 8Gb RAM and a pair of 72Gb SAS disks costs just under £6000 ($10kUSD).
I'd love to do some JBoss benchmark on a mk2 1950.
Monday, October 23
Dell AMD Opteron servers
We've known about this for quite some time, I think I heard the first rumors last November and we saw new AMD desktop machines from Dell about a month ago.
And now we have to new shiny Opteron Socket-F machines. They all run Linux of course.
First the anticipated Dell PowerEdge SC1435. A nice little box, as I've said before, the rack mounts in the SC series just get things done. I do think the price tag at around $3000 USD is a bit high. That'll probably drop quite a lot if you haggle with Dell and buy them in bulk. It is a perfect JBoss server, deployed in a nice farm of course, or it would make a very nice HPC node.
Now if just Dell would send me a few of these to test, they could use a bit of blogger hype. :)
The second new box looks even more interesting,
the Dell PowerEdge 6950.
A four socket machine with up to 8 cores and 64 Gigs of memory. On par with the HP DL585 and sort of a "half size" machine compared to the Sun X4600. I wonder which box packs the best bang for buck, but thats for another post. But a similar speced X4600 cost about twice as much, but on the other hand you get the extra scalability and future proof CPU cards instead of on-board socket-f.
The PE 6950 takes 5 internal SAS disks and has got 7 (free) PCIe slots.
Thats quite a lot of I/O for more NIC's and HBA's, do I dare to say this makes a very nice RAC node. Probably one of the top players in the area, team it up with a decent SAN and you are in business.
Starting price is not bad, not bad at all. An entry-level machine comes in at around $10000 USD.
.
See the product videos over at direct2dell.
Enjoy.
And now we have to new shiny Opteron Socket-F machines. They all run Linux of course.
First the anticipated Dell PowerEdge SC1435. A nice little box, as I've said before, the rack mounts in the SC series just get things done. I do think the price tag at around $3000 USD is a bit high. That'll probably drop quite a lot if you haggle with Dell and buy them in bulk. It is a perfect JBoss server, deployed in a nice farm of course, or it would make a very nice HPC node.
Now if just Dell would send me a few of these to test, they could use a bit of blogger hype. :)
The second new box looks even more interesting,
the Dell PowerEdge 6950.
A four socket machine with up to 8 cores and 64 Gigs of memory. On par with the HP DL585 and sort of a "half size" machine compared to the Sun X4600. I wonder which box packs the best bang for buck, but thats for another post. But a similar speced X4600 cost about twice as much, but on the other hand you get the extra scalability and future proof CPU cards instead of on-board socket-f.
The PE 6950 takes 5 internal SAS disks and has got 7 (free) PCIe slots.
Thats quite a lot of I/O for more NIC's and HBA's, do I dare to say this makes a very nice RAC node. Probably one of the top players in the area, team it up with a decent SAN and you are in business.
Starting price is not bad, not bad at all. An entry-level machine comes in at around $10000 USD.
.See the product videos over at direct2dell.
Enjoy.
Saturday, October 14
Running Ubuntu 6.10 on Abit AB9
Playing around with my new media center PC at the moment.
Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy (daily build from Oct 13th) installed without too many problems yesterday, most of the hardware on my Abit AB9 pro motherboard was detected out of the box.
However the ethernet controller, a Realtek 8111B, card was not detected.
From lspci I got Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Unknown device 8168 (rev 01) and after a quick look in google I found this article on how to get the card working. Worked great, just download, change the three MODULE_PARM lines in the src to MODULE_PARM_DESC and it compiles ok.
A few notes on installing Linux on the AB9 motherboard though, a few thought from my experience. First of all, use a very recent version of Linux. Ubuntu 6.10 worked for me and I'd expect Fedora Core 6 would work.
Use the jmicron controller, not the ICH8R controller for the disk and optical drive.
Another thing, which I think is just related to me not having used debian/ubuntu enough. After I partitioned my disk and create ext3 file systems using labels I was unable to mount using LABEL=foo, turns out I had to restart the udev service before they showed up. In CentOS, they just appear under the dev-mapper.
I'm quite impressed on how good it looks on my LCD television. Even xvid files in HDTV resolution look great.
Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy (daily build from Oct 13th) installed without too many problems yesterday, most of the hardware on my Abit AB9 pro motherboard was detected out of the box.
However the ethernet controller, a Realtek 8111B, card was not detected.
From lspci I got Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Unknown device 8168 (rev 01) and after a quick look in google I found this article on how to get the card working. Worked great, just download, change the three MODULE_PARM lines in the src to MODULE_PARM_DESC and it compiles ok.
A few notes on installing Linux on the AB9 motherboard though, a few thought from my experience. First of all, use a very recent version of Linux. Ubuntu 6.10 worked for me and I'd expect Fedora Core 6 would work.
Use the jmicron controller, not the ICH8R controller for the disk and optical drive.
Another thing, which I think is just related to me not having used debian/ubuntu enough. After I partitioned my disk and create ext3 file systems using labels I was unable to mount using LABEL=foo, turns out I had to restart the udev service before they showed up. In CentOS, they just appear under the dev-mapper.
I'm quite impressed on how good it looks on my LCD television. Even xvid files in HDTV resolution look great.
Thursday, October 5
Media Center 10g
I'm currently shopping around for a combined media center PC / Oracle test box, must be the first time someone tried to combine those two in one box. And the first time someone plan to hook up a Oracle server to a television set. But they, there is a first for everything.
Currently looking at the new Intel Core2 processors. The 2.13GHz E6400 seems to be the best value for money. I wouldn't mind the E6600 with 4Mb cache, but the extra £67 can probably be spent on something that adds more value to the system, like an extra SATA disk to distribute the IO load. Not sure if AMD AM2 processors are a valid option anymore? The new Intel 965/975 chipsets are probably not supported in Solaristhough, where as a Nforce chipset probably works gret.
Found a quite decent looking case for the system as well, the Silverstone LC17.
.
I'll post a photo of sqlplus on a 32" LCD television once I buy the system. :-)
Currently looking at the new Intel Core2 processors. The 2.13GHz E6400 seems to be the best value for money. I wouldn't mind the E6600 with 4Mb cache, but the extra £67 can probably be spent on something that adds more value to the system, like an extra SATA disk to distribute the IO load. Not sure if AMD AM2 processors are a valid option anymore? The new Intel 965/975 chipsets are probably not supported in Solaristhough, where as a Nforce chipset probably works gret.
Found a quite decent looking case for the system as well, the Silverstone LC17.
.I'll post a photo of sqlplus on a 32" LCD television once I buy the system. :-)
Wednesday, September 20
Update of updates
Another quickie update, nothing fun to report anyway. Been busy fighting WebSphere lately, trying to get decent performance on a Sun T2000 server. Out of the box performance was horrible. Websphere 5.1 is still far from satisfactory, I'm putting my hope on Websphere 6.0 now.
Updated Sun boxes:
Sun finally decided to update the classic vXX0 range. Just a simple face lift to be honest, they still run the same range processors. The v440 has been replaced by the new v445, the v240 with the v245 and the 1U v210 is replaced by the v215.
The main two updates are the use of SAS drives and the addition of PCIe. Same basic features as the Galaxy and Niagra servers. They updated the chassi to Andys design.
My favorite new feature is the fact that you can have twice as many drives in the v445. 8 SAS drives instead of the old 4 SCSI. Might even be usable as a Oracle server without external storage. Oh, one last thing. No Solaris 8 support, bad bad. Who uses Solaris 9 anyway?!
Oracle patch release:
Patch release 9.2.0.8 is out, not much new. Bug fixes and a patch for the dreaded select-view-permission-hack security hole. I have tried applying it to both 9.2.0.4 and 9.2.0.6 machines without any hickups. 4547809 in Metalink (now if Oracle would just make these patches available for anyone to download *sigh*).
Btw, I've switched to KDE at work as well.
Updated Sun boxes:
Sun finally decided to update the classic vXX0 range. Just a simple face lift to be honest, they still run the same range processors. The v440 has been replaced by the new v445, the v240 with the v245 and the 1U v210 is replaced by the v215.
The main two updates are the use of SAS drives and the addition of PCIe. Same basic features as the Galaxy and Niagra servers. They updated the chassi to Andys design.
My favorite new feature is the fact that you can have twice as many drives in the v445. 8 SAS drives instead of the old 4 SCSI. Might even be usable as a Oracle server without external storage. Oh, one last thing. No Solaris 8 support, bad bad. Who uses Solaris 9 anyway?!
Oracle patch release:
Patch release 9.2.0.8 is out, not much new. Bug fixes and a patch for the dreaded select-view-permission-hack security hole. I have tried applying it to both 9.2.0.4 and 9.2.0.6 machines without any hickups. 4547809 in Metalink (now if Oracle would just make these patches available for anyone to download *sigh*).
Btw, I've switched to KDE at work as well.
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