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Chat Transcript



Dell-KongY Aziz, any upcoming Dell HPC whitepapers?
aziz_g Yes, we're planning some, first we'll have a few blog posts.
Dell-KongY Aziz, that's great to hear.
Dell-KongY I forgot to intro Aziz. Aziz is a Dell lead engineer in HPC land. :)
WilliamStianche Is anyone here an expert with the Dell PowerEdge m1000e?
WilliamStianche I have a quick question about it.
Dell-KongY What's your question around the Dell PowerEdge m1000e?
WilliamStianche What is the black plastic panel that ships with it used for? It looks like it can slot into four of the blade bays but I don't know what it is for.
ceri Hey, I wondered that too.
WilliamStianche Yeah I just got two Dell PowerEdge m1000e’s in and racked and I saw that part and said to myself "cup holder”?
Dell-KongY Sounds like spacers for a blade chassis that is not fully populated.
ceri It was snowing when ours were delivered so I thought maybe they were tiny sledges.
WilliamStianche But it protrudes from the front about 5 inches and doesn't block airflow at all.
Dell-KongY Ah, then I retract my previous response. :)
Dell-KongY Let me ping P G Engineering Solutions.
ceri I can say that ours have been running quite happily for three months without it.
WilliamStianche I was also curious about the anti-static bubble wrap but I assume that is for wrapping the blades if you remove them.
Dell-ScottH Can you take a picture?
WilliamStianche I would have to run over to the data center but I certainly can.
Dell-ScottH Let me go look at the hardware manual.
WilliamStianche I didn't see it in the manual but I might have missed it.
ceri Are you in the office this week, Scott?
Dell-ScottH Yup
aziz_g Like a small rack to put a USB DVD drive?
ceri Aziz, it's the right kind of size for that.
WilliamStianche Yeah, OK it could be that.
erson Are we allowed to talk about the Dell PowerEdge M910 information on support.dell.com/manuals?
WilliamStianche But I am not sure that the DVD drive cables would reach far enough to use it like that.
ceri Hey, we didn't publish it, Erson. ;-)
aziz_g Our chassis didn't have it but I saw others using it for that.
erson I expected the information to be pulled when I told the DTC geeks about it! :)
Dell-ScottH Well, tomorrow is a big day :-) I mean I guess it is. :-)
Dell-KongY Exactly what he said. :)
erson Yeah, heard you were going to tell about the hardware earlier.
erson IBM put out their eX5 information quite early as well.
erson They have been very low key about any CPU information regarding it though.
Dell-ScottH Yeah, tomorrow is actually our uber-launch day. Hushhhh, the marketing people don't like to jump the gun, they feel it builds some type of anticipation – whatever! :-)
ceri You wouldn't want folks excited about your product. You'd end up like Apple or something. ;-D
erson I guess very few people buy a quad sockets server out of anticipation. Although I probably would if I had the cash to do it. :)
erson Have I missed any announcements about that DMC 1.1.0 was released?
erson Shouldn't that be a semi-big hoopla in Dell enterprise circles?
Dell-ScottH It wraps into the uber-announcements tomorrow.
erson ahh
erson So, is the new iDRAC as well then?
ceri Any chance we will see cmc.next as well?
Dell-ScottH "Solutions for the virtual era."
erson Dell is visiting me onsite in about three weeks to talk about EqualLogic and any other things we would like to talk about.
WilliamStianche You guys are all talking about stuff I haven't gotten a chance to play with yet. :(
Dell-ScottH cmc.next might be soft announced with it, but it’s still a few months out for release on the Web site.
ceri Scott H., ok.
WilliamStianche What is cmc.next supposed to include?
Dell-ScottH William, you have blade, right?
ceri William when did you get your chassis?
Dell-ScottH Is it up? You should be playing right now. Put that CMC on the Internet and let me have some fun! :-)
Dell-KongY Erson, you mean you didn't hear about DMC 1.1 launch?
WilliamStianche They arrived onsite back in August but we didn't rack them until February and I am still waiting on our network administrators to get me LAN connections.
Dell-ScottH William – it’s new stuff.
Dell-KongY How about trying this: ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/sysman/dmc_1.1.0_a00.iso?
ceri No!
Dell-KongY It should be live today. :)
erson Kong, yeah, saw it earlier today when I checked the Dell FTP.
Dell-ScottH Oh man, sitting since August! How's the ROI going?
WilliamStianche Yeah I have had the stuff for over half a year and haven't been able to do anything with it.
ceri What I/o modules? I might be able to save you some hassle based on recent experience.
Dell-KongY I knew you would see it, Erson. :)
Dell-ScottH Wow oh wow!
Dell-ScottH Erson is the Internet gold-miner!
erson It was released yesterday and I tweeted about it when I saw it today.
WilliamStianche Yeah, well, we had some problems with renovations for our new data center and problems with funding contracts, etc.
WilliamStianche I work for a university, what can I say?
Dell-ScottH You should put it up in a dorm room or at a frat house.
ceri Hah, I thought we were bad; it took us about eight weeks to get racked and connected. I’m also at a university.
erson Kind of a bummer that the Dell PowerEdge M910 only has the same gigabit LOMS onboard like the PowerEdge M710.
Dell-KongY William, ouch.
WilliamStianche We have a Quad rate InfiniBand in each chassis, a Cisco switch in each and a Brocade FC in one.
Dell-ScottH They’d probably have innovative uses for that black tray. :-)
erson Hmm, then again the onboard LOMS don't have the bandwidth to support much else.
WilliamStianche I wouldn't want beer to get spilled on it.
Dell-ScottH Maybe that's why we shipped the black tray – it’s a beer shield!
WilliamStianche Ha ha
Dell-ScottH It’s included with every university purchase.
ceri Nice. You are likely OK then. We did have to do a Fabric OS upgrade across the SAN in order to connect the Brocades, as we had 5.0 very old everywhere else and the brocades need 6.2.
Dell-ScottH What are you doing with the InfiniBand? What applications?
erson I'm jealous if he says Xsigo.
WilliamStianche We have one chassis fully populated with Dell PowerEdge M610’s. We are going to be running Platform LSF on it for doing Oceanographic modeling.
ceri The Dell PowerEdge M8024 and M6220 had a firmware issue when we got them in January and lost some configurations across the reboots. New firmware was released in the last few weeks to fix it.
Dell-ScottH Ahhh HPC stuff - cool.
WilliamStianche I would love to do Xsigio but I didn't see it until after we got the equipment.
WilliamStianche Once I get LAN connections I will update the firmware to the latest on everything.
WilliamStianche The second chassis is going to be a small ESX farm.
WilliamStianche Three ESX servers and a VirtualCenter machine.
Dell-ScottH Are you in a warm part of the world? Maybe I can make a personal visit to "validate" your design.
ceri Oh, and if you want to use DPM with vSphere 4 you might hit the same FlexAddress issue that I did.
WilliamStianche I’m in south Mississippi, only about 10 miles from the Gulf.
ceri So just lie to vSphere and give it the hardware iDRAC address as a workaround.
Dell-ScottH That's almost close enough for a road trip.
Dell-KongY Sounds like an offsite to William's campus!
Dennis_S I say Scott drives! :D
WilliamStianche I am actually located at the nation’s largest Rocket Test Complex.
WilliamStianche The university has a teaching and research site here.
ceri Is the Dell PowerEdge M910 a half-height blade?
erson Ceri, it’s full height.
Dell-ScottH Ceri, thanks again for getting me that information on the iDRAC bug with flex. I can't believe how long it will take them to work in the fix, but I've never been a real code developer so I guess I don't "get" the process.
erson Ceri, all the information is available at support.dell.com/manuals.
erson Even Flexmem is mentioned.
ceri Scott H., that's fine, I have a workaround so no big deal. Thanks for helping to get it fixed/accepted.
ceri Erson, and the Dell PowerEdge M905? (I am reading the manual, just not that part.)
erson Ceri, full height
Dell-ScottH William, have you been doing that long? I used to work at IBM and seem to remember some Mississippi HPC stuff.
ceri Ah, well. Still, 512GB of RAM. Mmm.
WilliamStianche I am just getting into the HPC stuff but I have been working at this site for over three years and for the university at another campus for seven before that.
erson Ceri, Flexmem is nice... even if you only populate it with two 7500 CPUs you can still use all 32 DIMM slots.
Dell-ScottH It's probably been 8-9 years.
ceri Erson, oh that is awesome.
Dell-ScottH I had some of the guys in here talking about it on Friday and we recorded it. It should be on the blog tomorrow.
WilliamStianche What exactly is Flexmem?
Dell-KongY Great stuff, William. Thanks for sharing.
WilliamStianche No problem.
erson Each CPU has 8 DIMM slots in the Dell PowerEdge M910. Normally when you only use two of the four CPU sockets you then also only get access to half the DIMM slots, Flexmem solves that problem and gets you access to all 32 DIMM slots even if you only have two out of four possible CPUs.
WilliamStianche That is pretty neat.
SeanO I have a question for a remote office single server VM solution on a Dell PowerEdge R710 that includes backup options.
sudh I just wanted to understand how you would build a NAS that gives NFS mounts using EqualLogic as the back end, no I’m not looking at Windows storage server. Are there any other options available?
Dell-ScottH There's a "bridge" type device that goes where the CPU should have gone and connects them all up.
erson The Intel Xeon 7500 (Nehalem-EX) supports a maximum of 16 DIMM slots per CPU.
erson I'm guessing that Flexmem trick doesn't work on the Dell PowerEdge R910 with its 64 DIMM slots.
aziz_g Sudh, how about just using Linux and exporting the storage as NFs?
WilliamStianche I forgot which model CPUs we got on our PowerEdge M610’s. I know they were Nehalem though.
SeanO For a Dell PowerEdge R610 use Xeon 5500.
erson Seano, or Xeon 5600
ceri Erson, the manual talks about installing a bridge in a Dell PowerEdge M910.
ceri Sorry, you said Dell PowerEdge R910.
SeanO True
erson Yeah, like Scott H. said, you're inserting a bridge in the CPU sockets that you aren't using.
Dell-ScottH Sudh, right now all our front-ended solutions are WSS based, for now.
SeanO Hey, does anyone know of a way to present local host storage to a VM as raw disk?
ceri So what kind of GPU solutions are there for Dell servers, given the RemoteFX stuff that Microsoft was talking about last week?
Dell-ScottH Seano, built out with VMware or Hyper-V or Xen or does it matter? Do you want all included and shipped from factory? With file server, messaging solution and back-up?
sudh What about Solaris and then use the ZFS?
SeanO Scott, you got it - VMware ESXi 4.
SeanO I can do configurations, etc., I just need to know how to get a good backup on a single host to a tape of the entire VMDK, not OS/agent based backup.
ceri Sudh, you can build a kick-%%% HA-NFS solution with Solaris, ZFS and Sun Cluster. I know because I did it in November.
erson By the way, has anyone seen the “The Girl with Dragon Tattoo” in the U.S. yet?
Dell-ScottH Of course you guys ask all the storage stuff when Jeff skips out on the chat!
ceri It was a fair bit cheaper than Celerra. ;-)
sudh Did you blog about it? :)
ceri I did want to ask Jeff about some stuff, too. I think EqualLogic might be coming of age in our area.
sudh And ZFS has just added data dedupe, so I heard.
ceri Sudh, only internally, I'm afraid. But it was too simple. Sunw.hastorageplus and Sunw.nfs agents are all that's required.
ceri ZFS has compression and dedupe, it's nice.
sudh It mmight be a great solution to build Dell servers with Solaris and back end on a 10GB EqualLogic used for data archiving of clients etc.
ceri But Oracle/Sun are somewhat unclear about how much Solaris costs at the moment.
ceri Pages with licensing terms et al are changing pretty much every day at the moment.
Dell-aziz_g I used EqualLogic with StorNext for a benchmarking study. I guess that would be a similar setup.
ceri Sudh, you can also thin-provision with ZFS.
ceri Yeah, our setup required NFS as the only decent Unix-supported file level shared protocol, and we abstracted the storage away too.
ceri We started using it as an ESX backend on Friday in test, and now we don't need SRM either.
Dell-ScottH Sean, this is not in my area of expertise but maybe Veeam or VizionCore have some backup options that could work.
SeanO I gotcha.
ceri Sudh, if you want to drop me mail, feel free.
Dell-ScottH The Veeam guys are all over Twitter, VizionCore too.
sudh Sure, thanks.
ceri Sudh, I’ll be able to paste a link in a mail too, my Mac doesn't seem to want to let me do that here. <Email address removed.>
ceri So since it has gone quiet, I'll say that our PowerEdge M1000e and PowerEdge M610’s are rocking. Small niggles: 10GB Ethernet cards won't PXE boot or do Wake-on-LAN, and we have had some problems with native VLANs.
erson-laptop What 10GB Ethernet cards?
Dell-ScottH So, "rocking" is a good thing?
ceri "Won't PXE boot" probably harsh, they do, but since we had native VLAN issues they wouldn't do anything useful.
ceri Scott H., yes, most certainly.
erson-laptop 710’s or 711 or Intel?
ceri Erson, the Broadcom’s. You have to use UEFI in order to be able to PXE off the cards.
erson-laptop Hmm, there are no 10GB Ethernet Intel’s if I remember correctly.
WilliamStianche Yeah hopefully I won't need to PXE boot or do any Wake-on-LAN stuff. All of my equipment will be on all the time once I get it running.
erson-laptop Is anyone using UEFI?
ceri Erson, I was for about a day when I thought I needed to. ;-)
ceri The system management stuff in there is superb.
erson-laptop Yeah, the CMC is nice.
Dell-ScottH I’m curious if the FTP update options are useful for real customers? Can you actually make/support those connections in your datacenter?
erson-laptop I wouldn't mind a standalone application for KVM over IP though, and virtual folders.
ceri Erson, I meant the stuff in UEFI.
WilliamStianche I have played with the CMCs a bit on my chassis but only through the KVM.
Dell-ScottH cmc.next
Dell-ScottH And likely idrac.next.
erson-laptop Great.
ceri I would really like to be able to specify a TFTP block size on the FwUpdate command.
ceri The CMC image is too big to be transferred over TFTP with the standard one.
Dell-ScottH I'm going to be like a therapist for a minute. Please tell me more.
ceri Scott H., FTP options are useful, but we don't trust external sites to stay around for the lifetime of a system, so we mirror all that stuff.
Dell-ScottH Because I'm going to copy and paste to CMC developers.
ceri Scott H., tell me if you need more about the TFTP.
erson-laptop Ceri, UEFI is just a bios switch to get rid of the old bios. USC is the management stuff.
ceri Erson, yep, but you only boot to it from UEFI, I think?
WilliamStianche It was nice chatting with you folks. I have to pack up and head out. See you around!
Dell-ScottH Ceri, that might be enough – I probably don't need more detail.
ceri Thanks, William.
Dell-ScottH Later William, great chatting with you!
ceri Scott H., basically, TFTP only supports files up to 32MB in size with the default blocksize.
ceri And either my TFTP server, or the CMC, doesn't support block-size negotiation. I don't know which.
ceri So I can't flash the CMC via TFTP.
ceri But if there was an option to specify it, that would work.
ceri I can download it with other clients that do allow me to override the default block size.
erson-laptop USC has died completely on me a couple of times. It doesn't complete the loading and hangs. Has anyone else experienced that?
ceri Erson, I've seen it take "a long time" but I don't think I've seen it just fail.
erson-laptop It has happened to me about three or four times.
Dell-ScottH You’re talking about just getting into the interface from the F10?
erson-laptop Yes
Dell-ScottH Don't boot into it on a regular basis, but of the six servers we have here with it, I’ve never had it hang.
erson-laptop I vented in some tweets a couple of months ago.
erson-laptop It’s quite easily solved though
Dell-ScottH Are you sure you didn't find some "unreleased" code on the FTP site in your gold-digging days? But seriously, what did support say about it? They have the knowledge base that we don't have access to, and would know if it's pervasive.
Dell-ScottH By rebooting?
erson-laptop Rebooting has never helped.
erson-laptop Reverting to an older iDRAC has helped.
Dell-ScottH Cold boot?
erson-laptop Cold boot didn't help either.
erson-laptop I'm thinking it got corrupt and the upgrading to the latest iDRAC again.
Dell-ScottH That’s possible.
erson-laptop The repair package for the lifecycle controller hasn't helped, but then again it shouldn't affect USC wither, should it?
erson-laptop I wonder if the Dell reps that are visiting me will be able to shed some light on the Dell PowerEdge 6300 and 5400 PowerConnect.
Dell-ScottH Who's coming to visit?
erson-laptop One Dell sale rep and one guy from a Swedish Dell partner.
erson-laptop I guess their hidden agenda is to try sell us some EqualLogic education or services.
Dell-ScottH Ugh, I hate the hidden agendas, but you should get the free lunch at least.
erson-laptop Hopefully I will get some answers about the new PowerConnects and chat some about architecture and maybe UPS’s.
cgreenoh I'm probably one of the only tech-type dudes I know that likes the sales guys, I love jawboning.
erson-laptop Our next purchase is a couple of PowerConnects for the server rooms and a new UPS.
Dell-ScottH I won't dog the sales guys, we need all types, and they are really good at talking. :-)
cgreenoh As they should be! :)
erson-laptop I have no problem talking (or teaching) my Dell sales reps about what technology they are selling. :)
cgreenoh Ha ha
Dell-ScottH The problem is now you are getting close to the powerconnect.next and you know it, so guess that's why they are also coming.
cgreenoh Good sales guys don't mind learning it either.
Dell-ScottH Oh I bet. I can't imagine a sales call with you. :-)
erson-laptop After a while they usually get their technical support guys on the phone right away when I'm calling. :)
Dell-ScottH Very true. The sales guys secretly want to be techies, but they don’t have the time.
SeanO The Dell sales representative will probably try to push you into Brocade or Foundry.
erson-laptop But it has worked great so far. Well, at least if my Dell sales representatives didn't quit every six months.
ceri Brocade or Foundry?
SeanO Well, that’s how it’s being presented.
ceri ;)
SeanO hehehe
erson-laptop Sean, instead of the PowerConnects?
SeanO Yes, with the partnership they may think you should go that route depending on configuration/need.
SeanO It would be a good question for them if they don't bring it up to you at least.
erson-laptop Quite possible.
erson-laptop We have quite a small environment so we can handle the somewhat cumbersome management of the PowerConnects and we don't need any exotic features so then it comes down to price.
SeanO Then it’s PowerConnects for you!
erson-laptop I would be interested in getting something serious for a dedicated iSCSI network with 10GB Ethernet for future EqualLogic arrays.
ceri Especially if you were looking for 10g.
SeanO That’s a good point - and timely!
erson-laptop The current Dell PowerConnect 6200 but with the Dell PowerConnect M8024-modules for 10gbe would be a good fit.
erson-laptop 48GB Ethernet and 8 x 10GB SFP+
ceri He he. I think the Gigabits to connect our M8024s to our foundry kit cost more than the M8024s themselves.
SeanO Ceri, exactly.
erson-laptop The GBICs for the Dell PowerConnect M8024 or for the Foundry?
SeanO Erson, I actually like the PowerConnect 6224 and PowerConnect 6248's we have used for different remote sites, but I know the PowerConnect line in general can be finicky.
ceri Erson, the Foundry ones.
SeanO Especially the Dell 5324 Gigabit Switch, I think they were. I hated those switches.
erson-laptop Sean, yeah, we have a couple of Dell PowerConnect 6248’s. They work. I leave it to that. :)
erson-laptop Dell PowerConnect has pretty awesome prices for 10GB Ethernet and stacking compared to the competitors.
cgreenoh Indeed
SeanO Yup, we also have a bunch of Cisco and I always drop my jaw when comparing pricing.
cgreenoh I really appreciate Dell switching.
erson-laptop If you're a really big shop you can certainly get some good discounts on Cisco and the others, but we are far from that.
cgreenoh Darn reliable, reasonably priced, flexible.
erson-laptop Scott H., so when is Dell releasing their bladechassi.next? :)
erson-laptop I’m taking a blind shot in the dark.
Dell-ScottH We’re pretty far from that.
erson-laptop Good.
Dell-ScottH And I shouldn't have even said that.
SeanO I heard the current chassis is good for another 2 years?
Dell-ScottH I'd say very safe assumption.
erson-laptop The mezzanines each have bandwidth for dual 40GB IS NICs.
ceri I was told to expect to still be buying a kit to fit the PowerEdge M1000e in four years' time, which I was a little surprised at, but happy about.
erson-laptop I saw the Dell PowerEdge M910 has four x8 mezzanine, the Dell PowerEdge M710 "only" has three x8 and one x4.
SeanO That’s nice. When they came out the thought was two generations worth of blade models, but they get 4-6 different generations in the same chassis.
erson-laptop They told me that the PowerEdge M1000e would hold for five years at least.
SeanO Erson, recently or was that at time of purchase?
erson-laptop Since release?
ceri My quote was in October 2009.
erson-laptop It was released early 2008 if I'm not mistaken.
SeanO I think that’s correct.
Dell-ScottH Guys I gotta run, but looks like you are doing fine grinding the rumor mill. :-)
SeanO Indeed... see ya Scott!
erson-laptop hehe Always grinding the rumor mill.
ceri LOL, thanks, Scott.
cgreenoh Me too, though I didn't add squat to the conversation. :) Later y'all.
erson-laptop I feed on it
erson-laptop Nehalem-EX chat next week!
erson-laptop I hope to see you all there.
Dell-ScottH Thanks for joining us today and thanks for keeping us employed! :-)
Dell-ScottH Yes, yes, yes! Nehalem-EX next week!
ceri ;-D
SeanO Coolness, I’m gonna drop too. Later everyone!
erson-laptop I will probably be refreshing the press page on dell.com tomorrow. :)
Dell-KongY Later, Sean.
erson-laptop bye
erson-laptop Kong, dynamic memory for Hyper-V with Windows 08 R2 SP1, woot!