joeware - never stop exploring... :)

I have been running more and more power hungry virtuals and finally had to load up some SQL Servers (I don’t like SQL Server the app[1]). This called to attention that I needed to use more than my older hardware for running virtuals so I ordered the materials to make Super Fast Virtual Mofo…. SFVM. I figured I should stick to the whole Fast Mofo naming scheme.

New hardware includes

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 Quad Core 2.66Ghz (yep, jumping back to Intel at the moment)

8GB DDR2800 G.SKILL RAM.

12 x 500GB 7200 RPM WD500 Disk Drives (SATA 3.GB/s)

LSI Logic SATA II PCI-X Controller Card – 8 Disk supporting RAIDs 0/1/5/10/50

ASUS P5WDG2-WS PRO MoBo (Someone convinced me that this would be the best Mobo for this config… I am skeptical of ASUS from previous experiences but will try)

Tagan TG800 800 Watt Power Supply

Sapphire Radeon x1050 256MB DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card

All wrapped up in a Lian Li PC-V2100BPlus II Black Aluminum Server Computer Case. (12 x 3.5 internal bays to start with)

I thought hard about using SCSI but the costs didn’t appeal to me, this was already far more than I normally ever consider spending. Plus having the spinning disk was very important because I wanted to more quickly be able to “enable” different environments versus unpacking and recovering them from DVDs.  Free from financial constraints I would have put in 20 of the largest capacity 15k SCSI disks I could find (12 in the internal 3.5’s, another 8 in 6 of the External 5.25’s with 3/4 adapters).

I would like to use MSFT virtualization but I don’t believe they have a x64 solution yet and plus when it comes down to perf, MSFT just can’t seem to keep up with VMWARE. Once I have this new machine completed I will move all of my current virtuals running on my old virtual hosts and on two of the newer machines reconfigure the disk layout and probably add some upgrades and then spin them back up as virtual hosts. There are three other really old physical machines that I will be shutting down and packing away which will be nice as it will free up some room. It will mean I no longer have any Dell desktops running in my house which is quite a change as I ran Dell for a long long time, I think it has been 10 years since I started running my first Dell Desktop. I still have one Dell laptop left but I am getting closer and closer to ending its life as well. On second thought, I may keep one of them and just rebuild it entirely as FreeBSD. We’ll see how it goes.

Of course I received the hardware from NewEgg in jigg time. The UPS man wasn’t thrilled, a ton of boxes and he had to haul it to my back door because I refused to shovel my front porch after all of the snow we have gotten lately.

Thoughts???

The case is HUGE…. Positively HUGE…. I opened it up and thought about moving into it as a second bedroom. That big…. Plus Lian Li cases…. most gorgeous cases out there that I have seen. I have two of them, one for my media center and now this server case. Jumping ahead, even with the all of these drives and everything else in it, it is quieter than several of my other PCs. It has foam applied to the sides to deaden the sound.

Power Supply… Excellent quality throughout. After this, I will buy no other power supplies other than Tagan.

The Intel Chip…. I opened the box and it was huge as well… oh wait, no that is the chip cooler and fan… Looks like something out of a sci-fi novel. Completely different way to attach it to the motherboard from what I have seen previously. Also no pins, just contacts.

MY one complaint at the moment is that 3 of the hard drives are bad. Well not completely bad, but bad enough that they are causing issues. If one of them is accessed by the onboard intel RAID it takes about 5 minutes to enumerate the drive. If one of them is accessed by the LSI RAID card it takes a while to load the BIOS but then it reports the drive is bad. Regardless of where I connect them they show as bad in the slots… So I take those as bad drives. Very annoying.

  joe

[1] I won’t explain it other than I am an infrastructure guy and I don’t believe SQL Server should be in the infrastructure. Its fine for business apps though.