Walt Reed spake the following on 5/24/2007 1:20 PM:
On Thu, May 24, 2007 at 10:48:18PM +0300, Mindaugas said:
Anyone on the list using newer HP G4 or G5 server hardware like DL36X or DL38X with Centos? Or other HP hardware?
Are you running Intel, AMD, or both?
Are you using SAS or SATA or a mix?
Are you using Centos 3, CentOS 4, or starting migration to CentOS 5
Are things rock solid stable without any issues?
I know older Compaq and HP boxen have been rock solid for us for years yet we wanted to check and test the waters b4 we consider unloading some bread.
We are using quite a lot of such boxes with CentOS and RHEL. Things are mostly rock solid except DL380G4. Those were absolute crap for us. If I remember right from 6 such servers we had to replace 1 DIMM in 3 or 4 servers, 2 DIMMs in one server. We also had ASR problems with one server. Our supplier brought motherboard for replacement which was even worse than ours. So they had to replace back our old motherboard and order one more motherboard from HP.
I've got about 20 DL380G4's and have had Very few problems. We've had bad memory in a few servers, but no more frequently than any other model of HP we have. Any memory problem I've seen has shown up within the first month. It helps that we burn them in for a month before putting them into production. I run some drive / memory excersizing utilities during this time that pound on the server pretty hard. Compiling the Linux kernel over and over again also seems to be a good test :-)
Failures after the burn-in period are quite rare with the exception of 500G SATA drives which we have in a few archival arrays. They seem to go bad frequently. 15K RPM 142G SCSI also seem to fail more frequently than the norm. By comparison, I have never had an EMC drive (several hundred FC and SATA) go bad in the ~2 years they have been running by comparison, and they get pounded on a LOT harder.
I also had a rash of 500 G SATA drives fail I lost 4 out of 12 in the first month, and 2 more since I went into production. I think the Maxtor drives they were using are no longer being sold, and the replacements have been rock solid for over a year. The Adaptec SATA raid controllers have been nothing but junk, but it is probably also related to the Maxtor drives. I will never buy anything but 3ware SATA unless they mess with EXT2/3 again.