[CentOS] newer HP G4 and G5 servers and centos :-)

Thu May 24 19:48:18 UTC 2007
Mindaugas <ml at kilimas.com>

> 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.

  But why to worry about G4? G5 with Core2 Intels is much much faster. We have several such servers and those did not have any problems. CentOS 5 runs out-of-the-box on them. CentOS 4 some new update also runs without problems.

  We are using SAS drives. Used SCSI on older servers. Those new SAS controllers also are much faster than old SCSI ones. For sequential reads/writes (dd if=... of=...) even several times faster.

  When HP released DL385 server with Opterons we bought quite a few of them. Had no problems also. Just now Core2 is faster than Opteron so we turned back to Intel. :)

  Mindaugas