ASUS RS720Q-E8-RS8-P and ASUS Z10PH-D16 Thread
- Thread starter Patrick
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I called up their main number around 7:30PM PST, got bounced around a few times but landed in the right place. I basically told them that 2 DIMM slots were broken and that's all they needed, no debugging required with the agent. The agent initiated an Advanced Replacement process that I got in the mail right away, (they require a product hold amount on a CC of ~ $2K!). They're shipping a brand new unit chassis (chassis + motherboards) over the next few days (I can't keep the motherboards that are fine), free -- and I'll ship back the chassis with the two defective motherboards, free.
The process was essentially painless but it took 1h20 on the phone, a bit long.
Before any of this I filed an inquiry online linked from the product page but that went absolutely nowhere. The agent couldn't even find it in their system. Nothing like a phone call it looks like, still.
System still in RMA (3 weeks in so far); they can't find a replacement chassis and are offering a `
RS720Q-E8-RS12 ` instead. Also, they are asking for S/N numbers for the motherboads, can you guys see those without unscrewing the motherboard from their own chassis ? I cannot.
I think that RS-number indicated number of HDD bays in the system. So you're getting 4 more bays, which is always nice.
After almost 6 weeks into the RMA process, the obscure SN was finally identified as a substring of a string painted on the PCB. An Asus serial-number expert called and literally had me read all numbers on the motherboard (he knew all 4 serials ahead of time, we needed to pick out the two of the broken MBs). That made the process go forward; they reserved and (apparently) tested the 2 replacement motherboards that got shipped yesterday out of Louisville, KY. Overnighted via fedex and delivered in CA this morning. I'll be testing the hardware this evening, ship back the defective boards and hopefully put this Advanced RMA & SN thing to rest. 
I have 2 ASUS chassis, like to know where is the SN in case I need to RMA the board in the future.
Do you have a picture that you could post?
I am a little nervous, although I tested all the ram slots when I first received the chassis.
Due to only have limited ram on hand, plus the price of ram is out of sight now.
Currently, I do not have all the ram slots populated, I hope it stay problem in the future.
Do you have a picture that you could post?
I am a little nervous, although I tested all the ram slots when I first received the chassis.
Due to only have limited ram on hand, plus the price of ram is out of sight now.
Currently, I do not have all the ram slots populated, I hope it stay problem in the future.
I've had a RS720Q-E8-RS12 for a couple of years running ESXi on two nodes and compute tasks on the other two. I think I was a fairly early adopter, and the install was a bit rough, with one of the node motherboards being bad and needing RMA - I had the same issues above, with ASUS even accusing me of removing the serial number from the box! No replacement for the 2 CPUs it cooked either.... The early BIOS/firmware was a bit rough (and still is - at least one of my nodes thinks both of the power supplies have failed...), and I made the mistake of using a Z10PH-D16 iKVM firmware, not the RS720Q-E8-RS12 specific one, at one point. That node still has different fields in the firmware!
What I wanted to report was that I had to replace the M.2 boot drive in one of the ESXi machines a couple of weeks ago. They have two CPUs, so I decided to try the newish Toshiba RC100 drives. These are the only M.2 2242 NVMe drives I have seen. They are "only" PCIe 3.0 x2, so they are not the fastest NVMe drives, but they are still much faster than USB... I couldn't find the 480GB versions anywhere, but the 240GB versions were only $80, and are big enough for both boot and some local flash cache on ESXi. I've only done the one node so far, but it booted up and ESXi 6.0 installed without any issues, and I've not had any issues since. Haven't fully configured the cache yet, because I haven't had a real maintenance window to do the other box in the cluster.
What I wanted to report was that I had to replace the M.2 boot drive in one of the ESXi machines a couple of weeks ago. They have two CPUs, so I decided to try the newish Toshiba RC100 drives. These are the only M.2 2242 NVMe drives I have seen. They are "only" PCIe 3.0 x2, so they are not the fastest NVMe drives, but they are still much faster than USB... I couldn't find the 480GB versions anywhere, but the 240GB versions were only $80, and are big enough for both boot and some local flash cache on ESXi. I've only done the one node so far, but it booted up and ESXi 6.0 installed without any issues, and I've not had any issues since. Haven't fully configured the cache yet, because I haven't had a real maintenance window to do the other box in the cluster.