Well, I spent most of yesterday working with the new server. I know, I know, I should have been doing some actual work. But all this really is necessary to get my environments up and functional.
The first step was to add a couple of instances of LH Server to the machine. For the moment, we're using the Virtual Server 2k5 R2 SP1 beta. I may have to install VMWare on the server at some point if a viable build of HyperVisor isn't available soon, since Virtual Server doesn't support x64 guests. And both Cougar and Centro are pure x64 only. But for the moment, I'm working with VS.
The first instance is the Domain Controller for the Example domain. Installing Enterprise Edition of the current CTP build of Longhorn, start to finish, was about 25 minutes. Not bad. Added the necessary roleds for it (DCHP, DNS, and then AD itself), and we're on our way.
Two more instances - one a Terminal Server instance with just under 4 GB of RAM available to it. Another an instance of Server Core.
Three full Longhorn server instances running, and this machine isn't even breaking a sweat. I'm loving it already.
So, after living with it for all of a day and a half, any new thoughts? Well, those 15,000 RPM drives may be fast, and each one is fairly quiet, but having 8 of the little guys whirring away is noticeable. I expected it, but that's just a price for the extra speed they give me.
The 5 1/4 inch front accessible drive bays could do a better job of noise control. In the desire to make them easy to use (which is well achieved), they can have a tendency to transmit vibration into the case where it gets amplified a bit. Some judicious silicon rubber would be useful here, IMHO.
Heat? Yeah, well what did you expect? The new generation Xeon processors aren't nearly as bad as the old ones, but the FBDIMM modules are real heat sources. And there are eight of them in there. HP has a special deflector that comes right off the fan to the top of the modules, and that keeps them from frying, but doesn't change the total heat put out. But what's important is that HP has designed this case well to handle the heat that it can generate and it's not having any issues at all. Which is pretty impressive, since I've loaded this thing with just about every possible heat source you can imagine. Just about the only thing I didn't do was opt for quad core processors. The 5130's I chose are relatively efficient and a good deal more cost effective. And I could upgrade to quad core if I find I need the horsepower. At which point, I could actually bump up the RAM to 32 Gb, since the quad core upgrade supports 4 GB RAM modules. If you can afford them!
Charlie.
I finally have all the pieces for my new HP ProLiant server - an HP ML350 G5 loaded with all the goodies. First the specs:
2 - Intel Xeon 5130 dual core processors
4 - 2x2 GB fbDIMM modules (16 GB total)
8 - 72 GB, 15k, 2.5" SAS drives (configured as a single RAID5 volume)
1 - HP Smart Cache P400 w/ 512 Mb of battery backed RAM.
That's the core server from HP, to which I added an Adaptec 48300 PCI-X controller, with 2 - 36 GB 3.5" SAS drives and 2 - 400 GB SATA drives. The SAS drives are my boot mirror, and the SATA drives are in a simple stripe (RAID0) to provide additional storage where speed and redundancy doesn't matter.
The goal of this server is to be my main virtualization host as I write about the Longhorn wave of Windows Server products, starting with Longhorn Server itself, and continuing into Cougar and Centro. It will live not in a data center, but under my desk, and as such it needed to be quiet. And it is, remarkably so.
Over the coming days, I'll try to go into more details about this server, and my experiences with it. But let's start with some initial impressions. First and foremost, this is one extremely well built and designed server. It's quiet, it's powerful, it's seriously fast, and it's a real joy to work on. I could have gotten installation support, and had some poor HP technician try and find his way to the distant part of the world I call home, but I thought it would be more interesting to see how easy (or difficult) it was to actually build it up myself from pieces. So it came with the extra RAM, second CPU, upgraded RAID controller and SAS drives separately. I was running it, initially, with just the Adaptec controller and drives while I waited for the parts to come in. And today they arrived via DHL, and, in roughly 2 hours, I installed every single bit of extra stuff. Not bad. In fact, really, really good. That included upgrading the firmware and the P400 firmware, and reading all the various cautions and docs.
What was perhaps most impressive about the 350 is how well thought out the interior of the server is. Everything is easy to find, easy to connect, easy to plug in, etc. All the cables are well laid out and adding a new module or RAM or even hard disks couldn't possibly be easier. The instructions are clear, but almost unnecessary. Heck, almost everything I had to do today I could do entirely by looking at the pictures on the back of the case side panel. The only exception was the battery module for the P400 controller. I searched and searched for instructions on where the module was supposed to sit, and never did find them. But once I took a look inside, and compared the clips on it to the available places on the chassis where things could go, it didn't take long to figure it out. But a picture would have helped. (In fairness, the ML350 ships with an internal "slot 0" RAID controller, the 200, and that module is extremely well documented. The P400 is an upsell that works on a wide variety of HP servers.)
Now, with all the goodies in, it's powered up and already hosting the February CTP build of Longhorn. (The underlying host OS here is Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition.) I'm frankly amazed at how fast this box is - I don't usually get to play with hardware like this. But what's most important to me is that it has the power and the headroom to get my job done, and done efficiently.
Charlie.