Mike’s Blog

I haven’t posted recently as I have been busy with other things.

So far, I have migrated 14 physical servers onto the new platform and have images started (and some ready) for migration of another 6 servers in the next 4 days.

Initial savings realized so far is approximately 12A of 110V power.  I will post more when I get a few more things done.

On a different tangent, I am working on VMware certification, starting with the VSP (VMware Sales Professional - required) and then onto VCP (VMware Certified Professional).

Why?  This will allow ipHouse to sell VPS based services for customers, allow us to sell VMware products to customers directly, and officially support and consult on VMware products and services.  Ooh, exciting isn’t it?

Codeweavers is giving away their software for one day, you can read about their press release yourself.

Why am I mentioning it here?

I commend Mr. White and his company for making a challenge then following through on the promise of free software to all americans (and those on visas) if any of the goals were met.

My hat is off to you!  I hope tomorrow gives you back everything you are giving your users.

As promised, a picture:

Isn’t it beautiful?

The fun is getting going - ordered up the 8 servers as listed in the configuration in my blog post from October 4th, 2008 on October 14th, 2008.

This will give me 8 host systems and one spare on the shelf (I’ll be using it for test deployments and such as well).

Ship date: October 16th, 2008.

Weight: 862lb

Due date: Today!  October 20th, 2008.  (Dell tracking said Friday the 17th, but obviously that wasn’t correct, but was in Minneapolis at 8:49am and out for delivery)

I have moved one production system over already (one of the POP/IMAP servers) and performance has been excellent.  Over the next few days I’ll get 3 more of the host systems online and migrate the other POP/IMAP physical servers over, then tear down the old systems and remove them from the rack(s).

There is one snag holding us back for the web server side of things - a PDF library that was used by our in-house web guy for automatic formating of PDF documents.  We’ll get this worked out soon and start that migration as well.

Once I get these initial 10 systems retired and out of the racks, we’ll rack up the other 4 host systems and prep them for the eventual task of migration of our caching and authoritative name servers (4), our SMTP servers (8), and measure again how things are going (performance, power, etc).

Part 4.1 coming soon, with pictures if I remember a camera…

I measured another system at the office today looking at usage on a 2950 with Energy Smart power supplies, and L series processors (50W each).

Idle usage was 2.1A, and when I pushed the system as hard as I could to light up 4 cores the system went to 2.9A of power.  This is .3A higher than the PE2900 system I am looking at deploying.

There were 2 differences, first, L5410 processors - 2 of them and not just one.  The E5420 used in the 2900 is 80W, the L5410 (and L5420) are 50W each.  That 50W *could* account for ~0.43A of power at 115V.

Second difference - 6 7200 RPM SATA disks vs the 4 15K SAS disks in the 2900.

I’ll continue to see if I can get an even closer match to test against, but I am beginning to wonder if I should drop the whole idea of the 2950 with L series processors just because the cost savings in power do not rack up enough to cover the much higher cost in the server ($450-$700).

EDIT: Updated from .23A to .43A as the difference for 50W CPU at 115V - bad math!