I think I had at one point an ATI card with specs similar to your "new" one. It had the same fate as your old Quadro
I think I had at one point an ATI card with specs similar to your "new" one. It had the same fate as your old Quadro
I received the 'new' ATI card in the mail today. Installed it. Works!
I've installed VMWare ESXi on the USB drive and so far things are looking good. If all goes well I may upgrade the server somewhere this weekend. I'm not sure what day and time though. You'll know when everything is down. That's me upgrading the server
Yesterday Sverf and I upgraded Sverf's server. The plan was to replace the motherboard / CPU / RAM with new parts and to put in a fancy raid controller and two extra 3TB hard drives. The first part worked, the raid controller part not so much.
Sverf's server has gone from an Intel Xeon X5650 6-core / 12-thread CPU to an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 6-core / 12-thread CPU. The memory was upgraded from 24GB DDR-3 to 32GB DDR-4. And a quad-port HP Intel server network card was installed.
The 24-port Areca 1280ML raid controller we wanted to install seemed to be broken so we had to skip that step. That also meant that we couldn't change the system from running Xen virtualization to VMWare. After we had given up on the raid controller the rest of the upgrade went pretty smooth. Swapping the hardware was pretty easy and after that Sverf did some fancy Linux stuff which goes well beyond clicking next-next-finish in the Ubuntu graphical installer
The following hardware was installed:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600 CPU € 168,95 ASRock B450 Pro4 Motherboard € 86,90 32GB HyperX RAM € 275 Zotac ZT-71304-20L € 58,65 HP Intel Quad-port server network card € 70
Pics!
Spoiler!
Sverf's server currently hosts the HappyDiggers MC, Vanilla, Snapshot and FTB servers. Before the upgrade the FTB server which currently runs the HappyDigers AMP 4.x mod pack was sitting on a mean tick time of about 55~60ms. This means the server was slightly lagging and with the amount of mods in AMP that becomes very noticeable. Right now the FTB server has a tick time of about 20~30ms. This means performance has roughly doubled going from the Xeon to the Ryzen. Of course to be fair the Xeon was getting really old at this point as it was from the first generation Core series. Still, it's a nice upgrade
This afternoon one of the four 300GB 10K rpm SAS drives failed. These drives run in raid-5 so a single drive failure does not mean any data is lost. I've moved the VMs running on this array to the new 6TB SAS drives and replaced the faulty drive. The array is now rebuilding.
Nothing fancy. Nothing to worry about. Just another drive failure. The replacement cost about 50 euro.
Last night the server crashed. Turns out the Areca raid controller is slowly going bad. After restarting the server the controller wasn't recognized any longer. After another restart the card re-appeared.
As was announced on the front page I've removed 64GB of RAM from the server to be send to Jiro along with parts for the server he's building. When I started the server after that the Areca raid controller was gone from the system again. Another restart and it was back. Being able to reproduce that kind of behavior is never a good sign.
I've got back-ups of the complete VMs that run on the server but still it would suck if the raid controller would die completely before a replacement arrives. I've been looking for a second hand Areca controller. That's going to cost about 200 euro. For now I'm just going to hope that the controller will continue to function as we're not looking to be spending extra money on hobbies right now. We're in the process of moving and we've got quite a lot of expenses to cover in that regard. If it'll last a couple more months I'll be happy to replace it in the summer.
Anyway. Important thing to note is that the server got a big performance bump by taking out half the RAM. The reason for this is that one 64GB kit was rated for 2133MHz while the other is a 3000MHz kit which was running at 2133MHz. The new AMD CPUs benefit greatly from faster RAM which can't be said for Intel CPUs unfortunately. Right now the new TnFC server seems to be running about 25% faster than before. Or rather, it's using 25% less time per tick. Which is nice
As some of you may have noticed the server reboots every few days now. Reason for this is the Areca 1680 controller which is very much ready to be replaced. I checked the purchase receipt for it and I've had this controller since April of 2010 and is has been running 24/7 ever since. That makes it a pretty awesome piece of hardware in my book
To replace the 1680 I have ordered a second hand ARECA ARC-1880DI-IX-12 SAS 6G 12 Port RAID Controller for $230. Two years ago this card still sold for $790 new. According to Areca support the ARC-1880 should serve as a drop-in replacement for the ARC-1680 card. I'll make backups before upgrading, but if all goes well it shouldn't be much more work than replacing the card, booting VMware ESXi and (maybe) importing the raid volumes and then the VMs on those volumes. If all goes well...
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