@pete-s said in Experience with Supermicro Microcloud servers?:

@dashrender said in Experience with Supermicro Microcloud servers?:

@pete-s said in Experience with Supermicro Microcloud servers?:

@dashrender said in Experience with Supermicro Microcloud servers?:

@pete-s said in Experience with Supermicro Microcloud servers?:

@dashrender said in Experience with Supermicro Microcloud servers?:

What's the use case?

For blades in general? It's hyperconverged infrastructure, hosting environments, container clusters etc. Basically everywhere you want to cram in as much as possible in the least amount of rack space.

I suppose - but damn - that seems like a HUGE amount of compute power next to low amount of storage. If that's the setup you need - again HUGE amount of compute and tiny storage, then it's probably just fine.

I know what you mean but it's not really that low. Consider that the server I linked to have 3.5" bays. So you can have 2 x 18TB (standard enterprise size in stock) per node or 288 TB of raw storage per 3U rack. A rack full of those will give you over 3 PB of disk or 1.5PB of SSDs (8TB ea).

There are other models too, some have 4 bays per node. So you have some options.

that storage ends up being soooo incredibly slow, the power of the CPUs seems like they would be wasted.

Now if all of the storage is hanging off a single or split between two/three nodes, then we start looking more like a Scale box, only way smaller.

I'd be worried about only having two power supplies in there too. that might be a folly on my part, but with that many drives/CPUs and only two PS's?

Today you don't need a lot of spindles in an array to get speed. Storage would be blazing fast with for example two NVMe drives per node.

8TB is readily available but you could get 16TB NVMe drives too.

yeah, NVMe would be fast... I made an assumption before looking more closely at your picture that it was limited to HDDs.
which today would just be stupid.. so my bad.

Our own @Stuka in the picture 😉

@FATeknollogee said in Fedora 29 Server (or 28) install is stuck...?:

Update from SM:
"After we perform more test and use a non-widescreen monitor, we can finish installing Fedora 29 on our 4C version MB."

Very odd.

@scottalanmiller said in SuperMicro Faces Delisting from Cooked Books:

SuperMicro, one of the few large remaining server vendors, is facing being removed from NASDAQ over failing to file for quite some time. This is major if the vendor cannot find financing or some means of delay on delisting.

So anyone want to buy a major server company?

@DustinB3403 said in Testing oVirt...:

Also I feel like the most popular instructions were a blog post, rather than official documentation.

I'm not even sure they have a dedicated techwriter. This is why it is better to just follow the official RHV docs. You'll have to filter out the Red Hat specific details, like subscription-manager, but you'll definitely have a better experience

@tim_g said in Port - Storage Spaces Direct (S2D): SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) needed only on HBA?:

@dashrender

RAID would be provided by SS.

He would need a controller that is pass-through.

Technically S2D is designed to be used by DAS systems (or JBODs if you like to make Scott facepalm), and not internal server storage... even though it works just fine.

There's no problem to use RAID controller instead of a basic HBA as long as you a) patch the registry (see my link below) or use special "filter" driver to report "RAID" bus (sic!) as SATA or SAS, and b) disable write-back cache on BOTH controller and disk itself, so all writes become atomic.

Storage Spaces Direct: Enabling S2D work with unsupported device types (BusType = NVMe, RAID, Fibre Channel). Part 1: Registry hack

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/resolving-enable-clusters2d-bus-type-support-issue-on-some-storage-controllers

P.S. It's a BAD idea to use anything like that in production because as long as Microsoft support will discover your S2D configuration isn't supported they will pull out and walk away with a grin face.

@dbeato said in Supermicro motherboard: update BIOS...who need DOS!:

@scottalanmiller so then it's settled 🙂

Right, it is UEFI not EFI, and not an OS. Like I said.

@FATeknollogee said in Korora 25 Cinnamon: watercooled workstation build:

@StrongBad said in Korora 25 Cinnamon: watercooled workstation build:

@FATeknollogee slick

http://www-rhstorage.rhcloud.com/blog/vtrefny/blivet-gui-20

I just face palmed reading that first paragraph:
New features
LVM RAID support
One of the biggest features of blivet-gui 2.0 is support of LVM RAID. When adding a new LV, you can now choose RAID level for it. LVM supports the same RAID types mdraid does but you can choose different level for every logical volume so it's more flexible than using LVM on top of an mdraid.

LVM still uses md raid, just like you would normally.

That said, people like their gui for all the things, why not have yet another tool to manage everything.

@travisdh1 said in Supermicro SuperServer E200-8D and E300-8D – review:

@DustinB3403 said in Supermicro SuperServer E200-8D and E300-8D – review:

@travisdh1 Yeah I saw that, which was why I was asking about it.

Just taking a quick look at the pricing, you can get those smaller Dell servers with 4 3.5" bays for less, at least in the US.

that's a main problem here in Italy. If you ask for a street price for dell or hpe you go cheeper then supermicro (and local SLA is better).

"Over time, we expect to see better support for the X553 NIC. The major competition for this unit will be when the higher core count variants come out and iterations that support 10GbE."

Yep, I'd completely agree. The current one is a great low power system for backups and what not, a low end XEON could make these a great box for home lab work.

The IPMI from SuperMicro has a web interface where you can do user maintenance for ipmi, remote control of hosts, record video(for recording other people's access to this system i guess), from there you can set Serial over Lan options. Here is the base screenshot
0_1489700739883_upload-091fd2a7-9d3b-47c4-9fc4-d2da1f8bbd7c
It does use java for some things still. There are also functions here i have no clue what they are. No idea what RAKP Protocol Setting is, but it is there.
Here is a nice feature, it shows how much power your host is using. It changes every few seconds.
0_1489700831467_upload-ebcd292b-738c-4ab5-beb0-1c419e6fc7ba

No, those pics are from SuperDoctor 5, It's a 1:1 free Server management tool https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/SMS_SD5.cfm

@stacksofplates said in Proposed server purchase for GitLab.com:

Omg I missed this absurdity from the original article:

We are also attempting to move GitLab application servers and supporting services (e.g. PostgreSQL) to bare metal.

Yeah, out of their minds.

SuperMicro recommends against RAID on the SuperDOM / SATA DOM modules but fails to explain why:

https://www.supermicro.com/datasheet/datasheet_SuperDOM.pdf