Not that I'm aware of. You need to buy larger/quieter fans or at least ones that you can throttle with a knob.
I have moved the server to a cupboard, about 1m width 2 m high but I worry it will overheat if I close the door, I'm not sure what are the acceptable temperature ranges for the air and the CPUs. Do you think the CPUs are gonna be ok with 40-50C? I don't wanna kill it by overheating.
It really needs to be vented...you're essentially going to make everything overheat, not just the CPU's. Namely the hard drives and the chipset.
Well, it's not really a cupboard, it's like a in-wall built in storage room thing, just can find a word for it :/ I've had the server in one in my room most of the time but I kept it open so it was ventilated. When looking at SpeedFan, the CPUs are at 25-35, around 40 when the door is closed. Remote temps show 36, 39 now however I'm not sure what these mean. HDD says 32 and Internal Temp is 35. All temps are in celsius. When the door is closed temperatures can go up by 10C. I'll measure the temps on closed door in more detail because I've kept it open just in case for now. Oh btw, these temperatures were measured at 35% fan speed of all fans. Honestly speaking, I don't have a good room to store it in this house (I moved in Sept last year). In the previous house, I had an entire quite large room that was dedicated to it :/
Hey tqhoang, again thanks a lot for all the assistance! i successfully flashed the bios to the default 2.18. good so far. I will confirm later which Processor i have. i tried installing Server 2008 but i am stuck at looking for drivers. i am not sure what drivers are ment as the system i have oes not have SATA drives but IDE. and as stated before Dual Opteron 246. i managed to install Ubuntu 10.10 with out error. will try installing ubuntu GUI later. i tried win 2k3 but it blue screen during install, "machine check error has occurred - Please check error loggs for details " error box came up several times. It failed totally on 2 machines. i also tried Win server 2k8, it got to the point of scanning for devices but with no drivers i could not continue (i dont even know what devices its looking for!) please help!
i have the 2 GHz 1 MB 800 MHz 10x 1.50 89 W Socket 940 August 5, 2003 OSA246CEP5AL (C0) Processor. i managed to install fedora 16 works well. still no luck with server 2003/ 2008. i also ran a memory test on the machine with no errors.
TQH: Do you know of any cheap hardware RAID controllers supported by ESXi 5? Thanks P.S Idk if I mentioned before but the SATA 3 HDD works with the Si3114 controller.
I only use the 3ware/LSI cards since they are well supported under Linux. For PCI/PCI-X, I think the only card that might be supported is the 8500-series. For some reason VMware did not validate the 95xx cards. There is a way to build the driver for it, but it's only for secondary storage and not the primary one...basically a PITA. I remember this was the case with ESXi 4.1 Update 1, but I can test ESXi 5.0 since I have both 8500 and 9500 cards. This probably won't be until sometime next week.
Your CPU's don't support any scaling, so stick with the basic HDAMA-G v2.18 BIOS then. I never had great luck with Vista on my box...kept getting those MCE's as well. I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit just fine though...aside from an occasional freeze when exiting PowerDVD (either AGP or video driver).
Okay no problem. I can wait. Currently I've installed ESXi on a 1TB HDD and I store most of the data there for now (2TB hdd is on the desk waiting for me to buy 1 more). I'm just still thinking of a good way to have redundancy in someway. I thought I could do software raid 5 in windows to protect some rarely used data like downloads plus software raid 1 for the partition holding the sql database. But that would still leave the ESXi install + VM configuration files + OS VMDKs unprotected... USB boot with USB 1.1 would probably take long time so I'm not even considering booting from USB. Best thing would be some sort of a 4 GB SSD PCI-X card Happy Easter!
No boot with HDAMA-I because of wrong BIOS? Hi comunity Hi tqhoang - master of comunity Purchased some servers with HDAMA-I motherboards. After hours of trying to boot from CD I found out BIOS of MB has been updated to "ver. 2.18B.RF4 for Rackable" which I guess is wrong BIOS ? Remember to have read in one of all these posts that with wrong BIOS some functionalities can be lost - like boot from CD? But what is irritating me is the extention of the BIOS version ".RF4 for Rackable". Is this a special version of 2.18B for HDAMA-I? Thx for feedback
This was probably just a branding string since it was probably requested/paid for by Rackable. It's just a string so you can ignore it. If you're 100% positive, then I'd flash the HDAMA-I BIOS onto one of them. There are several in my archive, with v1.26 being the latest but I haven't done any CPU-specific PowerNow mods yet.
TQH: Just wanted to let you know yesterday I was trying to use the stock caddy with the stock 80 GB HDD (never used the caddy before) and I realised the server's been acting weirdly with it. ESXi would detect the disk but would not allow me to format it, it would get stock on trying to load the current configuration of the HDD. I played with the jumpers but it didn't change anything. Finally, later the entire server refused to boot when the HDD was inserted (no sure why since atm I can't access its console). The caddy worked with a USB-to-SATA adapter. Not sure what's going on here but I decided to completely disconnect the caddy (I used to have the sata cable plugged in in case I wanted to use it). I'm gonna do some more tests with it.
Hi tqhoang thx for reply. Of course I shall flash v1.26 (did not scroll enought on page). But what is the difference between versions for SATARaid and SATALink (typically newbie question). And BTW - R U interested in receiving a copy of this special branded BIOS (v2.18b.RF4) ?
Hi tqhoang to be honest I could not wait your reply about which version to flash the BIOS. I chose v1.26 with SATARAID 5.5.0.0. Since that flash it works !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! After three days of trying and frustration about that MoBo's. Life can be so easy with the right konow-how. THANKS TO YOU. Tell me, do you have any paypal account for donation? Your information is so valuable I feel a bit ashamed to take it with just the word "THANKS". Regards from Switzerland
HarryHasler, The HDAMA-I motherboard comes in different versions, some have an integrated Sil3114 controller/ports on the motherboard, some do not. My Rackable system with HDAMA-I doesn't have a Sil3114 and SATA ports, so I use the base bios v1.26 version (i.e. no SATALink or SATARaid). If your's has an integrated Sil3114 controller, then you have the option to chose between tqhoang's versions of v1.26 bios to enable SATARaid, which gives you the ability to configure your attached drives in bios to create what is typically referred to as "fake raid" or "software raid", and SATALink which enables the Sil3114 controller to use it's Integrated SATA Transport, Link logic, and PHY layer, more info hereis on the siicon image website, but since I still have too few posts, the forume won't let me post the link. You need to decide how you want to use the controller and pick the proper bios for your situation. EDIT: Sil3114 weblink, add http and www in front of this -> siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?pid=28
Thanks is all that's needed (and allowed here). SATARAID = Can only use SATA hard drives in a RAID configuration (RAID0=striping, RAID1=mirroring, RAID0+1=mirror+striping). Keep in mind that this is the software-based RAID (aka Fake RAID) and nothing is done in hardware...all in the Silicon Image BIOS/ROM and the Windows drivers. SATALINK = Each SATA port is a plain hard drive.
Just a small correction. The standard HDAMAI BIOS contains an older Silicon Image SATARAID BIOS/ROM, but it doesn't get loaded since the hardware device does not exist. My mods only update the SATARAID BIOS to the latest or to a hacked SATALINK BIOS (courtesy one of the HDAMA users).