IBM Bladecenter Configuration

[FatTony80]

G'day,

I am wondering if anyone has any tips, tricks or things to avoid when crunching on a Bladecenter.

I have set myself the target of getting 14 Blades working for me under Fedora linux wihout the X GUI. At the moment I am collecting more blades and doing a bit of an electrical upgrade, this things sucks some juice! I bought the bladecenter just to mess around with and thought I'd crank up my old boinc account.

Ask me anything you like!

Cheers,
FatTony

[Mike Mitchell]

Got any pictures?

[FatTony80]

Currently it has 7 blades, and 7 old blades with no cpu, ram or disk as blanks. Should be online next week all going well.

I'd never set eyes on one before last week when it arrived on a pallet!

[FatTony80]

That'll keep the house warm  biggrin

You must have a more understanding partner, I'd never be allowed this at home!

It's in the office at the bottom of my server cabinet.

[FatTony80]

OK!

It's online and crunching away.

14 x HS20 Blades; Dual 3.2Ghz Xeons, 2GB Ram, 36GB HDD, Fedora 13

Hardware = $2,200 (delivered to WA from Melbourne)

Electrical Upgrade = $1,500 (4 new 16A circuits)

Setup time = 7 hrs

[veebee]

so that 28 Xeons crunching away ??? are they dual or quad core (forgive my ignorance of server cpu's) ?

either way, it will certainly rip through some work.... +1 for your determination Tony !!

[FatTony80]

These ones are single core, ~ 2004 vintage, the systems with dual core CPUs will lighten your pockets a tad more - http://cgi.ebay.com.au/?item=350347713747

And the quad core bad boys don't float around second hand yet, but if you wanted a new setup you'd be looking at ~ $7k for the chasis + 14x ~ $4k for the blades... about $63,000.

[FatTony80]

I had a quick look at the power meter as I left work, it's one of the old spinning disc ones, looked like a circular saw  :-\

[Mike Mitchell]

@Veebee, remember when you asked if I'd be crunching on my servers at the data centre? I said they wouldn't let me use that much power. See below:  biggrin

Electrical Upgrade = $1,500 (4 new 16A circuits)

Some of the data centre powerpoints were 415V 70amp, it comes in much higher than that though.

@FatTony80: Plus one to FatTony80 for the dedication. Are the discs SCSI/SAS?

[clownius]

Just seeing that makes me think i may need to get an extra power circuit or three put in just for wherever my crunchers are going lol.  Cost a lot less than the electrical upgrade later.  Also make me wish i had 10k for a blade server it would look and crunch soo cool lol.

[FatTony80]

Thanks Mike, the discs are 2.5" SCSI, each server can take a maximum of 2 and has a hardware RAID controller onboard.

[Mike Mitchell]

Thanks Mike, the discs are 2.5" SCSI, each server can take a maximum of 2 and has a hardware RAID controller onboard.

Hmm, that'd make a sweet addition to my web servers. I've looked at a few blade options but will probably settle for a 3RU SuperMicro. They can have four quad cores, 128GB RAM and 12 SAS drives for virtualisation. Unfortunately, it is as expensive as it sounds but would make a great replacement for the Dell 2950's I share now.

For now, I just green with envy. 

[FatTony80]

I have a Dell PE 850 in a data centre for my hosting needs. The blades would be great for web hosting, you'd just need to have a ready supply of spare blades and modules in the event of hardware failure. You can do some pretty fancy virtualisation with Vmware ESX Server apparently, moving guests around with changing loads etc.