Experiment results - Dual Xeon E5 to Atom C2750

[OBasel]

I did something crazy today now that I got my first Atom C2750 board. I had a Windows Server 2012 R2 with 2x Xeon E5-2665's and 64GB of RAM that ran literally like 2 Ubuntu VM's. What a waste!

So I wholesale took the Supermicro Atom C2750 board with 32GB RAM (micron) and swapped for the dual Xeon setup.

After 3 reboots or so, and a nice warning message, finally it stayed in Windows desktop mode.

It didn't have a network connection so I put the Intel pro drivers on an ISO and mounted using IPMI. Disk recognized, drivers installed and whammo - 4 gigabit NICs.

I then had to manually map the NICs to the Hyper-V switches.

After that though... everything just worked. Total time to do the swap was only like 15 minutes without needing to re-OS install. Crazy IMO. Best part is my power consumption is now down by 120w idle and over 300w peak.

 

[PigLover]

Fabulous. More proof that this isn't your fathers Atom! I've been nothing but impressed with how much it can do on so little power.

 

[Patrick]

Really great that it works so easily. I am finishing up the A1SAM-2750F piece tonight. Very interesting if you can indeed just take a low utilization high power system, swap the board, install driver and be up and running. I never thought of that.

 

[Patrick]

Confirmed. I did this too. Worked as you mentioned. Adding this to a link in the main site post on the A1SAM-2750F.

 

[weust]

I know this is an old topic, but I can't help wonder why you guys are so surprised.

What I do miss is if OBasel created a cluster first, or just exported the VM's and imported them on the Atom machine.

In either way, nothing was changed to the VM itself, virtual hardware wise, apart from MAC address if that's set to Dynamic. And depending on the import option and location of the virtual hard disks, also the location of the vhd(x)'s.
You just configure to which VMSwitch the Virtual NIC is hooked up too, and press Start.

Had to do this a lot of times last year when we migrated from 2008 R2 to 2012, and the Cluster Migration wizard was unable to properly migrate VM's created in SCVMM 2008 R2 to Hyper-V 2012.