Wednesday, November 4, 2015

A New Server

This past Saturday, I got a new machine from Craigslist:

Intel Core i7 Six Core Processor i7-4930K 3.4GHz 12MB CPU
Samsung 32GB DDR3-1600 Memory
2TB Hard Disk Space (Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM))
ASUS P9X79 PRO Intel X79 XTX Motherboard
4x USB3 , 6x USB2 , eSATA Ports
UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) BIOS
6x PCI Express Slots, 8x DIMM Sockets
Integrated High Definition Audio
Integrated SATA II & III controllers
Sapphire ATI Radeon HD6670 1GB VGA/DVI/ HDMI PCI-e Video Card
LG 24X DVD+RW/-RW internal drive
Integrated Intel Gigabit Ethernet
SONATA Piano Black Mini Tower and 500W Power Supply
No operating system, keyboard, mouse or monitor included

All for $700. Of course I had the machine tested before purchasing it. Since there’s no operating system, I couldn’t really check the 2TB drive, which when I got home, I found it was dead. No biggie. As this machine was going to replace my old dual xeon box, I basically took the drives from there and played the swapping game. My “server” upstairs had 3 2TB drives in a raid 5 which I took out and put into this 6-core box. I took the 4 1TB drives from the dual xeon box and moved it to my server upstairs.

I also had a Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD which I then used as the boot drive for this computer. This box screams and is whisper quiet. It boots from bios screen to login in about 5 seconds. As this will be the a Linux server, I installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on it. This is a first for me to have a Linux server. All previous boxes were Windows. But since all my work is on Linux now, I figured it was time to do things in Linux. To run my virtual machines, I’ve purchases a license of VMWare Workstation for Linux. This will ensure that my existing VMs just have to be moved to this box and voila, they can boot!

After playing with this box, I knew I had to max it out, so I ordered 32GB of ram (4x8GB) and another 2TB drive. When they arrived, I played some shell game again. This time, 4x4GB ram came out of the 6-core box and moved to the server upstairs. The ram it had was moved down to the 6-core box. So now the 6-core box has 8x8GB RAM. I then added the 2TB drive to the RAID 5. And started the rebuilding of the RAID 5 from 3 drives to 4 drives. I can see that the reshaping will take some time. The best thing about it is that the existing partition is still available! Currently, while the raid is still rebuilding, I’m copying over about 250GB of VMs over the 1gb network to the partition. And my Plex media server is also usable! It is kind of addicting to see such high availability and performance.