Hardware Update

  • Article

Been a bit since I have published anything.

I'm currently working on a couple different things.

  • Getting System Center Virtual Machine manager reconfigured (lost my raid and rebuilt it)
  • Getting RDS all configured (post to come)

Though this post is all about hardware updates.

Since our last discussion, I gave a long hardware list.

Well, 2 of the Dell MD1000 Disk arrays are no good. They got shipped badly packaged. Things were bent and broken off the backs and the rack ears were bent. Though I figured everything else looked good. So I got these drive size converters, basically fitting a 2.5 drive to a 3.5 frame, now these are not just some shims. These had to position the SATA ports exactly in place where they would be on a 3.5 drive so that it can fit into the bay of the MD1000.

So a recap, I have 4 of these MD1000 units. I purchased 1 locally, one from a well packaged supplier off EBAY (tested every bay with drives) and two I thought I got a deal on from a refurb company in Canada. The two badly packaged units have bad drive bays. I'm not sure how this happens, the disks are just not recognized in these bays and the lights never light up. I got some electronic contact cleaner thinking the contacts are bad and that didn't help at all. So now I'm getting a couple units from where I got the other shipped unit that was so well packaged.

So to another problem, I had purchased this EMC DS-200B Silkworm switch, I got it for 10 bucks free shipping. Yes it was only 4gb, but hey it's 4 gb. I had got a steal on Fiber cards that were labeled network fiber cards for like 25 dollars with free shipping for like 12 units. Then I got a deal on a lot of like 20 4gb transceivers.

Well long story short, I didn't do my research to understand the difference between Fiber Channel and Ethernet, that they are totally not the same. I have worked fiber Ethernet and somehow auto associated based on eBay labels.  Now I got it all boxed up and on ebay as a complete package, switch, cards, transceivers.

Next I purchased a Quanta LB6M 10GB 24-Port SFP+ Switch QY139A Dual Power Supply with Rack Ears.

This came setup as one vlan, which wasn't a big deal to me, with it's own DHCP service, again I don't care (don't think I care that is). I'm still learning how to use this unit. This is now the backbone of all the servers. This is where I plan to share the SAN out between the main SAN server and the rest of the servers.

I still use the 1gb switch for all other communications between servers. Though I'm working on how to force some work though one nick and other work though another. I will provide a post on just that topic once I get to that stage.

Along with the switch I purchased a lot of 10gb Ethernet cards. Then I had to buy transceivers, I had already purchased some, but after looking at the cost I found a cheaper route. Copper wired patch cables. These basically have what looks a transceiver on each end and are rated for 10gb. These off eBay were like 8 bucks each, most of the transceivers I found were 10-20 each (which would need 2 plus fiber cable). So since the servers all in one place I simply didn't need to go fiber. Don't get me wrong I think fiber is just cool, and I do have some fiber connections, just most of them are hard wired.

That's most of the hardware changes thus far, I still don't have the right water cooling blocks, the ones I got simply won't work in the space so I ordered a couple new ones. Once I have those new ones I will be able to test cooling down the CPU's on a test box.

The only other hardware change is the RDS sever, I purchased a Tesla 6gb GPU compute card, it's an older card, with a big passive heat sink. I don't think my HP DL380 G5 was made for it, as the slot it sits in doesn't look like it could cool it efficiently. There also was no PCIe cables to plug up the extra power to it. So while the server see's it and I got the drivers loaded, it's not fully up because of lack of power. I have a power supply coming, I found other people have done the same. I also have another longer water block on the way as well. My hope is to modify the GPU and cool it as well with water.

Well that's all I have for now, on to the continuing adventures of Joe's lab.