Recent content by Ron Kelley

Awesome, thanks for the reply! I will look at the m90q and see if I can get a good deal on the secondary market...

Greetings all, I am looking for a small (portable), quiet, and low-power PC to run VMWare ESXi. I run a bunch of VMs to develop DevOps code and need a PC with 6-8 CPUs, 64G RAM, and NVMe support. My virtualization tool of choice is VMWare, but I could do Proxmox or XCP-NG as well. I have a...

Greetings all, I am a little overwhelmed by the VMWare licensing options and need some help figuring out which licenses (and how many) I need for my upcoming dev environment. We will be running 8x compute servers - each with 2x 10-Core E5-2697v2 CPUs, 256G RAM, and USB boot. We need vCenter...

Greetings all, Looking for any real-world experience with either the LSI 9460-8i or LSI 9560-8i with multiple NVMe drives in RAID-5. According to LSIs documenation (Product brief for the 9500 controllers): However, it does not say how much faster (if any) the 9560 is compared to the 9460 in...

THIS! This is exactly the kind of feedback I am looking to get. I will certainly test this with my system today. Thus far, I have compiled the following list of items to build the NVMe RAID set: # Create RAID /dev/md0 mdadm --create -c 1M --verbose /dev/md0 --level=5 -n 3 /dev/nvme0n1...

Thanks again, Dave!

Thanks Dave. Any performance tuning options you can recommend on the MDADM config? I have 3x P4610 NVMe drives and would like a single RAID-5 volume. The goal is to host VMWare VMDK files. I just ran some raw FIO tests against the drives; each can push almost 3GB reads/writes (128K block...

-1 for ZFS RANT (!!! I told myself not to talk about ZFS !!!) Adding tons of RAM to a server with 3x high-end NVMe drives just to get adequate performance is not a way to solve this problem. This seems to be a common "solution" for anyone with ZFS issues. "Oh, you just need to add <xyz>...

Appreciate your feedback. I have been watching (and playing with) ZFS over the past 5 years and understand the benefits it provides compared to other storage technologies. That said, performance has always been the worst part about ZFS - regardless of tuning (and I have spent many hours trying...

Greetings all, Looking to put mdadm for the first time into production and am looking for some best practices. I have used it in the past for non-production work, but a production install absolutely requires rock-solid uptime, reliability, and performance. Background: I have 4x NFS servers in...

Greetings all, A few years back, we purchased two 14-bay Supermicro Chassis with some B9DRi and B10DRi blades. At the time, it was a great way to add high-density computing to our racks. Fast forward a couple of years and it seems the VLP memory is very expensive (and hard to find) for these...

Follow-up on this thread. As per the previous post, I ordered 2x dual-port 40G NICs from eBay on Tuesday, and the cards arrived yesterday. Both in factory wrapped anti-static bags with rev A5 stickers. I installed one in my Debian server, followed the conversion guide mentioned in the first...

Thanks. I ordered 2 cards from the second seller for $25/ea last night ($50 total - free shipping inside the US). According to the pics on eBay, these should be revision A5 cards. The cards should arrive by Friday/Saturday this week, and I will update this post when I have a chance to apply...

Thanks for the reply! I see the seller is out of town until Jan 20, but I found a similar card here using Rev: A5 649281-B21 656089-001 661685-001 HPE IB FDR/EN 10/40GB 2P 544QSFP ADAPTER | eBay Do you know if this is the same card as in the other eBay link? They appear to be the same to me...

Greetings all, Looking for pair of inexpensive 40GbE NICs for my VMWare home lab (2x servers running 6.5u3). The servers currently have dual-port 10G NICs, and I would like to bump them to 40G. I already have 40G DACs from a previous setup. This will be pure Ethernet - no InfiniBand. I saw...