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. > 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. Don't forget the firmware updates. The one problem I've had with G4's falling off the network were solved with firmware / driver updates. > 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. Agree - go SAS where possible. Only downside is that SAS drive capacity is a lot smaller with the smaller form factor HP uses. > 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. :) Ditto. Have about 30 385's that have been pretty solid, but the G5's are faster. It matters when you are doing jobs that take months to run... :-)