I now own too much computing power

but is only reporting 750Gig of RAM but otherwise it's pretty cool.

Only?


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Impressive. So what are you actually going to do with them?

You mean besides heat the whole house?

Hehehehe I think the electricity company is going to love him too!

Impressive. So what are you actually going to do with them?

I have no clue - I'll probably eBay them, but I am thinking (scheming) of ways I could keep at lest one. I've loaded Vmware ESXi 6 on it and surprisingly the free version now allows use of all of the memory and processors. No vMotion and they limit max # of CPUs for a guest, but I'm impressed they relaxed the licensing on the free version.

but is only reporting 750Gig of RAM but otherwise it's pretty cool.

Only?

LOL I know. It actually has 1 Terabyte of RAM but I think some may be unseated after the breakdown and move to the Roussell Garage Datacenter... Perhaps I'll tear into it tonight.

Impressive. So what are you actually going to do with them?

You mean besides heat the whole house?

There is a definite temp rise in the garage, which normally stays pretty cool as it's basement-level and the ceiling above is uninsulated. If it stays, I'll definitely need supplemental cooling.

Hehehehe I think the electricity company is going to love him too!

Fortunately, Electricity costs in Alabama are some of the lowest in the nation. Still, even running in "low-power" mode, it's consuming about 1200 Watts and will cost about $80USD per month, and that's without factoring in additional cooling. It'll be hard to justify that, even if I could cancel some of the existing internet-based stuff and host/deploy locally. Probably best to just sell the beasts, unless I can source some cheap (free) solar/wind power. Maybe I can sell one, and buy enough solar panels and wind generators to power the other.... Or I could sell both and pay off some bills. Adulting sucks.

Terry

Well, while waiting on I7, I decided to go down into the basement and play. I still haven't decided what to do with the massive 80 core DL980s, but I did put two of the Sun SATA Fibre Channel enclosures online using FreeNAS 9.1.1 virtualized on ESXi 6 hosted on the HP DL 580 (4 CPUs, 40 cores 512Gig RAM). I have a dual channel FC controller in the DL580 and it's configured to passthrough to the FreeNAS VM. 32 Terrabytes (raw) online across 3 ZFS Z3 Vols and exported through iSCSI to the mac mini. It's working pretty well, so good, that I'm considering an "unsupported" configuration for Indigo.. As a side note, I have 4 more fully-populated enclosures that haven't been touched yet. I guess I'll have plenty of storage for a while. BTW, the configuration shown in the photo is consuming 1200 watts continuous

Terry

FullSizeRender 47.jpg (263.48 KiB) Viewed 3799 times

Plex, dude. Plex.

Plex, dude. Plex.

Yep, already got a small Plex server that's been running for years. I plan on using some of this for a playground to try live recording with Plex, Kodi, or one of the others...

Terry



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Thought I'd give you an update on my attempts to create some OS X VMs on the monster servers:

****Warning!! Unsupported configurations ahead! I you do this and run Indigo on it, don't come asking for official support! Jay will come to your house, drink your beer and pee on your server!***

So, after banging my head against the wall for 2 solid weeks, scouring every forum and blog I could find, I was ready to give up. I'd installed OS X on a previous ESXi version using different, generic hardware, but never on this combination of ESXi 6 and HP high-end server hardware. I installed unlocked, followed every step to the letter but nothing worked. I kept running into people that were having the same problem I was - the install hanging at the initial "Apple" screen with no real resolution, the exact procedure worked for some (most) people, but not all. I tried all sorts of tweaks and hack and tried every OS X version from 10.8 - 10.12 and was ready to give up, thinking it was just this particular combination of HP server hardware...

Since I didn't have a Windows PC at home, I had been doing everything through the web-based management tool, rather than using the Vcenter client. I'd already built 6-7 Linux VMs with no problem and love the web-based vcenter available now. I built a Windows 10 VM to run some Windows based DVD tools and decided to load up the Vcenter client to see what had changed since I last used it at work several years ago. On a whim I decided to attempt one last build of OS X (Sierra) using the Windows-based Vcenter. I used the exact same config parameters as the web-based build of Sierra, fully expecting it to fail at the same spot, well 20 seconds after starting the VM I was at the OS X welcome screen. Twenty minutes later I had a functioning Sierra VM... I have no clue what the Windows Vcenter client does differently the the web-based one, but it seems to be the only way to make OS X work. I'll have to compare VM config files created by both at a later date to see what exactly is different.

So a heads up -if you attempt this- make sure you build your OS X VMs using the Windows based vmcenter!

So what will I do with it all? I'm still not sure, I'll probably use the OS X VMS for testing playgrounds for various things but I doubt I'll run anything "production" on it - although I might reconsider for Security Spy or Motion, and maybe for Plex. I have two new (to me) 2012 Minis scheduled to be the primary and failover home automation servers. I've upgraded their Ram to 16 GB each and now just need to replace the original hard drives with SSDs and they'll be ready for service. I think I'll start a separate "High Availability" thread to chronicle the journey of a hardened Indigo setup...

Terry

Outstanding!

That's a good trick to know, I've noticed the different clients definitely operate differently. And even more so depending on the web browser you're using for the web versions. Looking forward to trying 6.5 with full HTML5 instead of flash!

The next question, is can you make a cluster between the two Mac minis and the HP, I've heard conflicting reports on "unlocked" hosts being controlled by vCenter Server.

Alexander

Thought I'd give you an update on my attempts to create some OS X VMs on the monster servers:

****Warning!! Unsupported configurations ahead! I you do this and run Indigo on it, don't come asking for official support! Jay will come to your house, drink your beer and pee on your server!***
Terry

He will. I had 6 bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale sitting in my fridge.. now I have Newcastle Brown Mac Pro 2008.

[jay (support)]

He will. I had 6 bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale sitting in my fridge.. now I have Newcastle Brown Mac Pro 2008.

It was time for you to upgrade...

Outstanding!

That's a good trick to know, I've noticed the different clients definitely operate differently. And even more so depending on the web browser you're using for the web versions. Looking forward to trying 6.5 with full HTML5 instead of flash!

FWIW, I've noticed no significant difference across latest versions of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, on Mac and and IE (Edge?) on Win10 with one exception; Chrome is the only one that would upload files from the client to a data store...sometimes. On occasion, even it would fail, enabling SSH on the host and using an SCP/SFTP program to upload was by far the most reliable.

The next question, is can you make a cluster between the two Mac minis and the HP, I've heard conflicting reports on "unlocked" hosts being controlled by vCenter Server.

Alexander

I won't have ESXi on the Minis, just native MacOS. One day, time permitting, I will load ESXi on both DL980s and play with that sort of stuff. Clustering & Vmotion isn't supposed to work with ESXi, but then again, I didn't think it would support & utilize 80 cores (8 CPUs x 10 cores + hyper-threading = 160 logical CPUs) and one terabyte of RAM on one host either, but it did so who knows.

Terry

He will. I had 6 bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale sitting in my fridge.. now I have Newcastle Brown Mac Pro 2008.

The wife and I decided to quit drinking around 6 months back . For the most part it's been ok; Newcastle Brown Ale is the only thing I truly miss. It was my favorite easily-obtainable beer.

Terry

I've never been particularly fond of alcohol but I did used to enjoy the occasional bottle. Sad thing is its not even produced here in Newcastle anymore. How can you have NEWCASTLE brown ale when it's made nearer to howardps town which is like 2 hours away or something.


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I've never been particularly fond of alcohol but I did used to enjoy the occasional bottle. Sad thing is its not even produced here in Newcastle anymore. How can you have NEWCASTLE brown ale when it's made nearer to howardps town which is like 2 hours away or something.

I guess this is the U.S. vs. European geography talking, but that sounds reasonable to me... heck, we consider myself and Terry in the same region ("Deep South") and he is likely to be at least 4-6 hours away depending upon where in the state he is located.