DL 380/G5 with 16G of ram

[Michael Vince]

Josef Grosch wrote:

>
> Hello,
>
> I've got a DL 380/G5 as an evalu unit. It has 16 gig of ram. I 
> compiled a PAE kernel but I'm finding that it is not very stable. It 
> crashes during heavy disk activity, ie. portupgrade -rav. Does anyone 
> have experience with this sort of machine and would you care to share 
> your kernel config file and/or advice.
>
>
> Thanks
>
> Josef
>
Yeah I just got my first HP DL380 G5 with 8gigs of RAM with a total of 4 
CPU cores, which is placed next to a bunch of Dells.
I got a HP because I needed a new server fast and Dell claimed 4 weeks, 
I will give you my run down on whats happened with me.

So far I am annoyed about many things, firstly at has no built in 
writeback battery on the 256mg SAS controller which means no write cache 
which is something you have to pay extra for from HP.
In the Dells its built in, with 256mg battery backed writecache for 
guaranteed filesystem consistency on sudden power loss,  write cache is 
important and is otherwise a waste of a good machine if you need top 
write performance, otherwise may as well get really low end stuff that 
has really simple controller cards like supermicro etc.

Currently it took over 2 hours to build world, on Quad Xeon Core 2

I have been doing all this while being on the other side of the world.
The other problem is the remote serial support via tip for reaching into 
the bios is quite stuffed, all the text garbles into a single line and 
is just to hard to read, I hacked the minicom port to use the USB to 
9pin serial device to see if I could make it more like how people in 
linux would use it and it made little difference.
It looks like HP were trying to have better remote serial bios support 
by going really basic command line style for remote BIOS control but its 
no good.
The Dell bios is all nice and menu'ed and works flawlessly over remote 
serial, no garbledness overwriting other text.

I gave up trying to do anything via the bios and aimed ta PXE remote 
install, this worked after a total of 5 hours.
It kept dieing out during the install, I finally got it right once.

Once I booted in a fresh FreeBSD 6.1-Release AMD64 install the 'bce' 
ether device kept dieing and timing out, looking back I have no idea how 
I managed to get a complete PXE remote install in the first place.

I managed to cvsup and build a new kernel under 6-stable after about 15 
reboots.

After a new kernel its been quite stable, but I originally wanted to 
just stick with Release.

There is no IPMI with HP even though it appears to be standard on most 
other x86 servers. On the new Dell they now have IPMI v2, and I can use 
a native FreeBSD IPMI client port for remote control. On HP it appears I 
have to pay for some kind of LO software, this might be the reason for 
useless uncontrollable remote 9pin serial for BIOS access.

I gave a simple test on the bce with stable kernel compared to the Dells 
with the em nics and it compared quite well but still slower then the Dells.
Also note all the Dells are 6.1-Release a lot of posts have come up 
lately saying the em is now even faster in stable compared to 
6.1-Release since the new driver updates, but considering I am getting 
97megs/sec via a simple nc test I don't think could/need to go faster.

Em Dell to Em Dell
dell1# cat /dev/zero | dd bs=1m | nc dell2 3000
^C0+18456 records in
0+18455 records out
1209466880 bytes transferred in 12.459299 secs (97,073,429 bytes/sec)

Bce HP  to Em Dell
HPDL380# cat /dev/zero | dd bs=1m | nc dell2 3000
^C0+19648 records in
0+19648 records out
1287606272 bytes transferred in 13.926151 secs (92,459,594 bytes/sec)

Mike