Retired NetApp SAS drives.

Recently we started retiring NetApp 2050 filers, as they have reached their End Of Line.  They have twenty-four 900gb 10k SAS drives.  I thought perhaps they could be re-purposed.  Initial investigation seems like a: "No".  I tried them in both an HP Proliant DL 380 G7 and a Cisco UCS M3 C220.  Both machines could "see" the drives but not do anything with them.

I am not sure of the purpose of this little board.  It has way too many chips on it to simply be a extension card for packaging sake.  It likely just doing something with the LED's.

I haven't spent enough time on this topic, but if anyone knows how to get these drives to be recognized on a normal server, please reach out.

SSD, M.2, NVMe and all that stuff

The genesis for researching all of this was to figure out why normal 2.5" SATA SSD drives don't perform all that great using the on-board SATA controller on my servers.  Honestly a decent battery backed RAID card with cache and SAS drives will out perform most SSD drives.

  Note this test was using a $20 SATA 6gbps controller.

Yes these are older systems and I should really do some testing with newer stuff....but...meh....On that note here is a 6th Gen i5 notebook.

OK!  So now let's look at the other form factor than the 2.5" SATA drives.  Here is what I have been able to learn from other sites.  The M.2 form factor, it looks similar to a micro-pci-e cards/slots.  The theory is that the drive is much closer to the CPU and bypassing the SATA controller, they talk directly over the PCI-e bus and do not have the overhead of SATA commands.  Now there is SATA SSD M.2 cards and NVMe SSD M.2 cards; they are not the same.  The SATA M.2 SSD's are "older technology" and in theory are limited to 550Mbps.  NVMe is newer and has something like 2000Mbps limitations and isn't limited to the SATA protocol.  Both cards fit into the same slot.  Even though some M.2 cards will have the notch on the other side, so double check your research before buying.

Now, what if a machine didn't come with a M.2 slot?  Such as my HP Proliant G6.  The aftermarket has a solution!  PCI-e to M.2 adapter cards.  Their isn't much to them, no integrated circuits, just traces.  I was very skeptical how this would work in older systems.   Also note that these

I borrowed a Samsung 128 SATA SSD, and purchased the adapter for less than $20 and did a bunch of testing.  On a newer Optiplex 790 Intel i3 system, the BIOS saw it, not sure about making it a boot drive, Windows saw the drive and bench marks were very fast.  The HP ML350 saw the drive, the BIOS sees it as a "Mass Storage Device", VMware sees the drive, formatted it, moved a VM over to it and ran tests.  The VM bench-marked very well.  My Dell Precision T5400 (Intel Xeon l5420 CPU) also saw it, and bench marked very well, despite the system board saying it can only do PCI-e 2.0, and the card is a PCI-e 4.0; that system could also not boot from it, despite the BIOS seeing it. 

Great!  Now I purchased an Cruical NVMe 500gb drive.  Benchmarks are even faster!  However the Precision T5400 could not see the it!  Strange.  At least my VMware server sees it. Also, I purchased an aluminum heat-sink for the memory chip, as they do get warm.

This is how VMware sees the controller:

Update.....I happened to get a picture of a mSATA SSD (short one) 

next to an NVME (tall one).....

picture taken from this YouTube video

Raritan KVM's and Cisco UCS servers

Had a real head scratcher:

Raritan IP based KVM model KSXII and Cisco UCS C220 M5 servers.

When the new servers were plugged into the KVM, locally (aka the monitor and keyboard plugged into the KVM) would work.  However, remotely (aka back at ones desk, using the Raritan remote software) the remote session was just black.  We tried a number of things, even a hammering on Raritan support wasn't helping.  Finally they sent us a silly little cable labeled "Video offset compensator".  It is a 6" male to female VGA cable, with what looks like a ferrite clamp, and USB port.  This device gets plugged into the server, then the Raritan KVM dongle, then the network cable that leads to the actual KVM.  

In this case means that three USB ports are required to connect a UCS to the KVM.   The UCS only has two USB ports; which makes this hard to use, and more difficult to say install ESXi via an USB thumb drive.  FWIW the Raritan D2CIM-DVUSB has two USB connections, I have been able to get away with unplugging the grey USB cable and having things work.  The D2CIM-VUSB only uses one USB connection.  I haven't researched the difference.  My assumption is that the USB port on the mytical dongle and the grey D2CIM-DVUSB is just a lead for power, meaning they could be plugged into a dumb hub of sorts...haven't tested yet. 

From Raritan’s Japanese site translated to English.  Assuming C220 video has the same/similar video offset

About AID-2054

February 29, 2016

On certain Lenovo M4 / M5 servers, the horizontal sync signal may have an offset of about 200mV when outputting video signals. 
Since our product CIM (Computer Interface Module) is designed to recognize a synchronization signal at 0 V on the assumption of a standard video signal, there may be a problem with screen display.

AID-2054 was developed to eliminate the offending offset.

Wireless Charging with Android

Ok, so not PC related but good info....

Recently got a new Android cell phone that features wireless charging.  Great!  It is supper nice to just rest the phone on the charger vs. having to plug in a cable all the them.  I specifically sought out a charging stand that has two coils so the phone can be in either vertical or horizontal position, and was rated to work with phone protective cases.  FYI not all charging stand come with AC adapters!

It worked great, until I brought into the office and plugged the USB cable into the surge protector at my desk which has a 2.1amp USB outlet.  The phone would charge for 10 seconds then say: "Wireless charging has been paused".  After a bunch of Googling and trouble shooting, (different USB cables, different chargers, different power sources, rebooting in safe mode, clearing app cache). 

I discovered that the phone would charge without the OtterBox Commuter series protective case.   I remembered that when I first used it at the house it work just fine, however I was using an OEM Samsung Fast Adaptive Charger.  Hmmm....grabbed one and plugged that stand into and presto...works like it should.  Now why the Samsung charger works and a normal "dumb" 2.1amp USB charger doesn't I don't know.

FWIW the Samsung Fast Adaptive Chargers list two power modes: 2amp @ 5v and 1.67amp @ 9v....interesting.

Riverbed WAN Accelerator

More recycling!   This RiverBed 5050 unit was put into retirement, so I played with it a bit.

A single AMD Opteron 2378 Quad core CPU @ 2.4ghz, upgradable to a 2nd CPU, 16gb ECC DDR2 ram (it had 8gb but I upgraded it to 16gb), LSI 1068 RAID card built in on the system board, holds sixteen 3.5" hard drives, it came with twelve 250gb Western Digital Enterprise hard drives, and dual power supplies.  The motherboard is propitiatory, so no replacement would easily work, it is designed for a very quick swap out.

The Riverbed OS (RIOS) is loaded on a Flash card that has the pin out of a USB header, like what one would find on a desktop motherboard.  These are "headless" systems, aka no monitor can be hooked up to it, all manipulation is done via a web console or a serial console.  I was curious so since it had PCI-e slots, I put a video card, and it worked, I was able to get into the BIOS, the RAID card utility, and use it like a normal server.

Buffalo Terastation NAS/Server

I got this one in recycling, I thought it interesting to play with.  It is has an Intel Atom 1.6ghz CPU, 2gb of ram (single slot of DDR2 so-dimm), dual network cards, USB 3.0, and a COA of Windows 2008r2 Workgroup Storage Server.  With a single Western Digital Green 2tb SATA drive it consumes a mere 24watts of electricity.  

Apparently when new it comes with a USB drive that one can reload the operating system, however since this is a number of years old and a recycle rescue, no such recovery was possible.  I loaded regular Windows 2008r2, which loaded fine, but require the hunting of drivers, unfortunatly the Buffalo tech support page is pretty useless.  For kicks and grins VMware ESXi v6.5 did run and install, however it would not see the NICs.   I didn't bother trying to hunt down compatible drivers.

I'd like to keep it and potentially run it as a FreeNAS or something but we only have so much need.  I'd like to put a 4gb module in it but apparently they are worth their weight in gold.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/790640-REG/Buffalo_WS_WV2_0TL_R1_2TB_TeraStation_Pro_Duo.html

Bending video card?

This is a new one for me!  I have never seen a passive heat sink "fail" and cause the card to bend!  Notice the bottom of the heat-sink is bulged out, and the screw head is at an angle.  The card seems to work perfectly, I just don't trust it.  The card is an AMD/ATI HD 6450.

P2V debacle

I got assigned a task of moving a VM from one site to another site recently.  No big deal....except...NO shared storage.  Oh and the source is VMware v6.5 VM and the destination host is a Hyper-V 2012r2 host.  Cripes.....

The VM to be migrated is Windows Server 2008 SP0, that is right not even Service Pack 1 or 2, and not Windows 2008r2.   Hyper-V converter won't install on anything older than 2008r2....cripes!.  I did get Disk2VHD by SysInternals to work wonderfully. 

I could not get the Hyper-V integration services (which includes things like virtual hardware drivers) to install as that won't install on anything older than server 2008sp2.  Cripes!  I was able to track down a really old copy of the integration tool kit for HyperV 2008r2, which did install on the VM and it took care of some of the hardware, but not all of it.  I still had to use the legacy network card to get connectivity. 

Why not just upgrade this silly VM to Server 2008 sp2 you might ask?  Well.....the app owner is scared of that upgrading might break it and want to test it thoroughly first.  Cripes!

ESXi 6.x and HP G6 ML350 server...continued

This is an update for a previous post....

I acquired another HP ML350 G6 server.  

Since there has been a number of updates since the last time I decided to beat my head against the metaphorical wall; I downloaded and installed VMware-ESXi-6.5.0-Update2-9298722-HPE-preGen9-650.U2.9.6.8.3-Sep2018 Everything went well until; I tried to use the on-board RAID card a SmartArray P410.  Scanning for storage took an extremely long time, it did find the storage, and during the creation of a volume it took a really long time.  Again the host would not shutdown.

I did a clean install of the "generic" 6.5.0u2 and all is well.  Except, vCenter reports it has a fan failure.  It doesn't see a "System fan 3".  I should say this machine is a single CPU system, and doesn't have all of the fans that a dual CPU system sees.  I will attempt to plug  5 wire fan in there and see if the error goes away.

Interestingly 6.7u1 will NOT install on a machine with Xeon 55xx series CPU's.  In v6.5 one gets a warning and continues.  In v6.7 one cannot continue.  On an HP DL380 G7 with a Xeon 56xxx series CPU, v6.7 gave a warning but did install. I later upgraded the CPU in the ML350 from an e5520 to a l5620 and ESX v6.7 did install fine.

FYI, my current vCenter is on v6.5u1 build 8667236; it will not accept an ESX v6.7u1 build 10302608.  I also tried on different vCenter build 9451637, and got similar results.  It goes all the way through the motions, and errors out at the end saying cannot start vpxa.  

Also I cannot update my existing vCenter.  Going through the upgrade process it simply fails without any useful information.  I haven't dug through the logs to find out why.  Changing the root password and a clean reboot did not help.

I also have a HP DL380 G7, when attempting to install VMware-ESXi-6.5.0-Update2-9298722-HPE-preGen9-650.U2.9.6.8.3-Sep2018, I was greeted with a purple screen.  Research shows that it is the ILO driver.  Others have gotten around it buy extracting different drivers, and repackaging the install.  I haven't had the time or ambition to go down that road yet.

older SSD drives from NetApp SAN

Picked up some 100gb 3.5" SSD drives from a retired NetApp SAN....quite heavy...pulled off the aluminum cover to see this.  Apparently those blue things are "super capacitors".  

Interestingly I have played a bit with these drives and they are basically unusable by desktop computers. Most SATA controllers recognize the drive, but the entire machine slows to an unusable crawl. A bit more research has shown that these drives are setup with 520bytes per sector vs. a normal 512bytes which really throws off the controller. Since these drives are OEM'ed Samsung, I tried their SSD tool kit, which didn't do squat.

I ran across this article but haven't had time to get back to it.

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads%2Fhow-to-reformat-hdd-ssd-to-512b-sector-size.4968%2F