We are starting off with my old home MAC PRO 4,1 - this is the Nehalem with dual E5520, 6 of 8 dimm slots populated with 1GB ECC RDIMM w/thermistor (!), 1 velociraptor of 4 hot-swap bays.
We have dual gigabit, no wifi, but bluetooth[might ditch this], and a Geforce GT120. Seems to have a single 1000 watt'ish power supply and darn is it quiet!
Loaded on a USB stick - ESXi 5.1 and we'll start from there.
I will probably boot it back to update and flash it to a 5,1 mac pro so it can use 1333 memory with 6-core lower power Westmere-EP and more ram of course.
Everything just worked as far as install!
Intel 10GBase-T adapter - just works!
LSI M5014 (!!?!?!) Just works! Even told me to press D to disable the battery which is very odd to see on a mac (typically a very graphical boot!) EFI works!
Bluetooth doesn't seem to work but who needs that?
Sound card? Not removable but who cares.
So we are going use to an extender to intercept the power and reroute the SATA port to the LSI card and maybe throw in a few more SSD. This card has the advanced Perfomance key which enables ALL megaraid functions! I am torn between maybe 4 x 4tb re4 SAS drives and maybe 4 ssd for cachecade 2.0 - not sure if I am satisfied - I might add the HP P420/1GB FBWC in place for RIS consistency on the disks.
I'm pretty certain you can boot without a video card based on prior generations capable of this. But we're thinking about running X on esxi to slice and dice a quadro 2000, 4000, 6000 up amongst some vm's
Ram? Well you can use any RDIMM quite fine, but with 8 total slots, 2 being gimped (westmere is triple channel) - we're going to have to do 8gb 1333 or 16gb 1066? Hard call!
CPU? We're going to try the famous L5639 - $70 cpu's with 6 cores, 12 threads, 60 watts - serious awesome sauce! Will it work? No idea! Fall back plan is a pair of X5650 but i'd rather use what is already prepped!
Disks? Again i'll fit 8 drives in this bugger! P420/1GB FBWC preferably but will fallback to LSI 9260-8i
Networking? Dual port fiber for that 10gbe times two
The PCI-e slots are similar to my DL380 G7 - dual x16 and dual x4 in x16 physical. Kind of not ideal but they had graphics on their minds!
intel/amd/nvidia needs to make a SAS/10gbe nic/and video card in one x16 PCI-e slot! Seriously folks! Can you imagine One giant ecc chunk of ram, one huge nvidia core powering 4 mini-sas ports, 2 displayport, and 4 x 10gbe (or 1 40gbe) ?!?! Someone PLEASE make this!
What have we learned?
1. Anything works fine with ESXi 5.1 on the mac pro. It is cool with the E5520 or definitely cool with newer chips (aka flashing up to 5,1). It is cool with regular PCI-E cards like LSI megaraid [also known as the 3ware 9750 just different firmware!]
2. Intel and Emulex 10gbe cards work fine too!
3. Regular RDIMM works fine! but makes fans roar! so I'll have to consider the cost of ram . $80 for 32gb , $330 for 64gb, $900 for 96gb ... Might we doing 32gb based on cheapness!
4. Will update with more information and pictures are we have time! It is really cool to see my $2K computer (many years ago) get a new breath of life and having 20gbe of ethernet to push VNC to OSX server and Client 10.9 should be interesting! I'm guessing I might have to throw a Quadro 2000 or 4000 in and dice it up to get decent performance out of 2D apps. We shall see.
One could pass through the bluetooth (keyboard mouse) and video and sound and use this as a workstation but that would be straight up GANGSTA!!
We have dual gigabit, no wifi, but bluetooth[might ditch this], and a Geforce GT120. Seems to have a single 1000 watt'ish power supply and darn is it quiet!
Loaded on a USB stick - ESXi 5.1 and we'll start from there.
I will probably boot it back to update and flash it to a 5,1 mac pro so it can use 1333 memory with 6-core lower power Westmere-EP and more ram of course.
Everything just worked as far as install!
Intel 10GBase-T adapter - just works!
LSI M5014 (!!?!?!) Just works! Even told me to press D to disable the battery which is very odd to see on a mac (typically a very graphical boot!) EFI works!
Bluetooth doesn't seem to work but who needs that?
Sound card? Not removable but who cares.
So we are going use to an extender to intercept the power and reroute the SATA port to the LSI card and maybe throw in a few more SSD. This card has the advanced Perfomance key which enables ALL megaraid functions! I am torn between maybe 4 x 4tb re4 SAS drives and maybe 4 ssd for cachecade 2.0 - not sure if I am satisfied - I might add the HP P420/1GB FBWC in place for RIS consistency on the disks.
I'm pretty certain you can boot without a video card based on prior generations capable of this. But we're thinking about running X on esxi to slice and dice a quadro 2000, 4000, 6000 up amongst some vm's
Ram? Well you can use any RDIMM quite fine, but with 8 total slots, 2 being gimped (westmere is triple channel) - we're going to have to do 8gb 1333 or 16gb 1066? Hard call!
CPU? We're going to try the famous L5639 - $70 cpu's with 6 cores, 12 threads, 60 watts - serious awesome sauce! Will it work? No idea! Fall back plan is a pair of X5650 but i'd rather use what is already prepped!
Disks? Again i'll fit 8 drives in this bugger! P420/1GB FBWC preferably but will fallback to LSI 9260-8i
Networking? Dual port fiber for that 10gbe times two
The PCI-e slots are similar to my DL380 G7 - dual x16 and dual x4 in x16 physical. Kind of not ideal but they had graphics on their minds!
intel/amd/nvidia needs to make a SAS/10gbe nic/and video card in one x16 PCI-e slot! Seriously folks! Can you imagine One giant ecc chunk of ram, one huge nvidia core powering 4 mini-sas ports, 2 displayport, and 4 x 10gbe (or 1 40gbe) ?!?! Someone PLEASE make this!
What have we learned?
1. Anything works fine with ESXi 5.1 on the mac pro. It is cool with the E5520 or definitely cool with newer chips (aka flashing up to 5,1). It is cool with regular PCI-E cards like LSI megaraid [also known as the 3ware 9750 just different firmware!]
2. Intel and Emulex 10gbe cards work fine too!
3. Regular RDIMM works fine! but makes fans roar!
so I'll have to consider the cost of ram . $80 for 32gb , $330 for 64gb, $900 for 96gb ... Might we doing 32gb based on cheapness!4. Will update with more information and pictures are we have time! It is really cool to see my $2K computer (many years ago) get a new breath of life and having 20gbe of ethernet to push VNC to OSX server and Client 10.9 should be interesting! I'm guessing I might have to throw a Quadro 2000 or 4000 in and dice it up to get decent performance out of 2D apps. We shall see.
One could pass through the bluetooth (keyboard mouse) and video and sound and use this as a workstation
but that would be straight up GANGSTA!!
