HP ProLiant ML350 G5 Server– RIP
Well, it’s been an interesting time with this ML350. It has done yeoman duty as my primary Hyper-V server for 3 1/2 years now. We’ve had good experiences, and bad experiences. Especially during the Power Supply mess three years ago, but it’s also been prone to misbehaving in any sort of power event, even though it’s been sitting behind a pretty decent UPS. And it eats SAS drives – I’ve had 4 or 5 of them fail. Now in fairness to everyone, this machine was completely maxed out. It had 16 GB of very expensive and very power hungry FBDIMMs, which produced a lot of heat. Eight 2.5”, 15,000 RPM drives didn’t help, but to make life more fun, I added 4 additional SAS drives off an Adaptec controller for boot and miscellaneous storage. So the inside of this server ran quite warm, pretty much 24/7.
And yesterday, as I’m sitting working at my desk, I heard it power down. It took a while to sort out things, but I finally deduced that it was reporting 2 failed CPUs. Now I seriously doubt that both of them spontaneously failed at the same moment, so I’m much more inclined to suspect something on the motherboard failed. In any case, we’re dead. And unfortunately, all my contacts at HP Canada have moved on to other worlds and places, so there’s not a whole lot I can do with this now very heavy doorstop. But it’s been a valuable and appreciated resource while it lasted. I hate to lose it, and it will make life here “more interesting” as I juggle environments and machines.
Charlie.