Repurpose old supermicro for nextenta stor?
Added by sam lee about 1 year ago
Hi- I have a machine which I am interested in possibly repurposing as a nexenta stor storage server... here are the specs (linux is on it now) - Any thoughts on if it will be possible to load. and thoughts on performance? ?Maybe I need upgrade to bios? http://www.nexentastor.org/boards/2/topics/24 Thanks.
Supermicro X6DH8-G/X6DHT-G BIOS vendor: Phoenix Technologies LTD 6.00 (08/13/2005) E7520 Memory Controller Hub (MCH) E7525/E7520 PCI Express x5) on Pci2: Ethernet interface - eth2 product: 82598EB 10-Gigabit AT2 Server Adapter vendor: Intel Corporation on pci3 network:0 82541GI Gigabit Ethernet Controller - eht0 network:1 DISABLED 82541GI Gigabit Ethernet Controller eth1
IDE interface product: 6300ESB PATA Storage Controller WDC WD800JB-00JJ (80 GB) /dev/sdi 6700PXH PCI Express-to-PCI (x2) 6300ESB 64-bit PCI-X pridge 2x CPU product: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.20GHz (Dual core) with hyperthreading (ht) gives 2 logical cpu per core
Mem: 8gb installed : 8 slots; DIMM DDR Synchronous 333 MHz (3.0 ns) populated with 4x 2GB in slots 0,1,4,5
RAID bus controller product: MV88SX6081 8-port SATA II PCI-X Controller vendor: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.
4 Drives on Sata, 4x WDC WD7500AAK and 4x WD1500ADFD-0
disk:0 description: ATA Disk product: WDC WD1500ADFD-0 vendor: Western Digital bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sda version: 20.0 size: 139GiB (150GB) -volume description: Linux raid autodetect partition physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,1 logical name: /dev/sda1 capacity: 139GiB
disk:1 (sdb, also WDC WD1500ADFD-0 150/139 gb) disk:2 (sdc also WDC WD1500ADFD-0 150/139 gb) disk:3 (sdd, "")
disk:4 (sde WDC WD7500AAKS-0 698GiB (750GB) disk:5 ("" 698GiB (750GB) ) disk:6 ("") disk:7 ("")
Replies
RE: Repurpose old supermicro for nextenta stor? - Added by Mat Simon about 1 year ago
You might have to try...
Anyway: The hardware, mostly CPUs are quite old, the last Netburst Xeon we ditched, was a HP ML350 G4 and even with decent amount of memory... these CPUs eat lots of power for not providing much of performance nowadays. This machine dated from around 2004 so I guess yours must be of similar age.
There is a chance the Marvell controller will be recognized since the Sun Thumper was using Marvell chips. You might want to check if it is a plain HBA or a hw RAID controller (later one is not recommended and I guess it is only a HBA)
8GB of memory definitely is on the lower end of what NexentaStor and ZFS like. Forget about fancy stuff like dedupe or high compression on the zVols. I'd guess that the 10GE card won't ever reach line rate - this hardware can't do magic but it might work for a low-spec repurposing.
RE: Repurpose old supermicro for nextenta stor? - Added by sam lee about 1 year ago
Thanks for the response. yes, this is probably 6 years old (at least) - We are looking at testing out nexenta stor as shared storage for a small VMware cluster (2 or 3 ESxi hosts). If things seem ok, we will purchase a newer machine for the primary and use this as backup storage. We are generally cash strapped, so if we can re-use this it would be great.
We could up the memory easilty to 16 gb. My understanding in general (not having used nextentstor, but having used other NAS for VMware shared storage) is that CPU is generally not as much concern, but I guess for compression etc, more CPU is used.
I will check on the Marvell controller, thanks again.
Also curious if there are any sample best practice "build it yourself" docs for me to look at to spec new HW if we decide to go with nexentastor.