Hello HPE Moonshot - Initial installation impressions

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Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Managed to receive a 200lb pallet at the data center loading dock today. The HPE Moonshot has arrived. It is a CS100 performance starter kit.

Specs
  • 15x cartridges with quad nodes each with AMD Opteron X2150, 64GB iSSD, 8GB RAM
  • 2x 180 port switches
  • 2x QSFP+ uplink modules
  • 1x Chassis module
  • 4x power supplies
Unboxing
Overall the process was very simple. All 15 of the 45 cartridges, switches and etc came installed in the box. The chassis does have handles to make moving it easier.
HPE Moonshot Being Unboxed.png
Moving to the rear you can see the two uplink modules on either side of the chassis management module as well as the 4x 1500W PSUs. They were a bit harder to slide in than I was expecting but realistically they are not going to get used much.
HPE Moonshot Being Unboxed Rear.png

This was in the unloading dock of the data center using a camera phone so apologies for the lighting/ photography. Unfortunately, the unit is now at the bottom of a rack in the data center to there is very little light.

Installation impressions
The packaging was great. Rails come with cable management arms even though there are very few cables. Something like 3x console RJ-45's, an ILO RJ-45, 2-3 other service ports and 8x QSFP+ 40GbE uplinks. The rails do stick out far on the ends so I did have an issue with mounting them in the rack with the zero U PDU. I did manage to get it in the rack but it was not easy.

If you are setting one of these up in a rack, the distance between the back of the rack ears and the front of the system is not that great. It is significantly deeper than the Supermicro SuperBlade (10-node) or the Supermicro MicroBlade chassis in the next rack over.

Power Consumption

Guess when the Moonshot came online in this graph (note I did need to move the Dell T630 in order to fit the Moonshot.
upload_2016-5-18_15-20-46.png

I am using only 3 PSUs since it gives higher efficiency with only 15/ 45 cartridges installed.
upload_2016-5-18_15-25-28.png

815w is not too bad for all of this being extremely idle. Remember, there are essentially two 180x1GbE + 4x 40GbE switches in the chassis along with a total of 60 nodes. I watched a few YouTube videos claim 15W/ node but we are seeing about 13.5W per node at this point. I still have not gotten to update firmware and etc, but I was expecting over 1kW so this was a nice surprise.

At least got to here today:
HPE Moonshot ILO logon screen.PNG

Moonshot dashboard:
HPE Moonshot ILO Dashboard.PNG

More to come. Thank you to @b3nz0n8 for all of the awesome resources as there are a few tips I am going to follow soon.
 
Last edited:

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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Wow that thing is a beast!

Are you planning to test certain usages for this or what's your goal with this unit ?
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Wow that thing is a beast!

Are you planning to test certain usages for this or what's your goal with this unit ?
Right now I want to get it up and running and do a mini-review on it. There are a few options for using it afterwards.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Extremely disappointed there is no real-life pictures of the server itself. Where is the close up shoots of servers nodes, switches, psu etc?
There are a ton of them online. I did add some unboxing photos.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Getting 2TB P3320's is extremely difficult. Those are also much smaller and easier to photograph.
 

b3nz0n8

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Feb 18, 2013
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If you are setting one of these up in a rack, the distance between the back of the rack ears and the front of the system is not that great. It is significantly deeper than the Supermicro SuperBlade (10-node) or the Supermicro MicroBlade chassis in the next rack over.
@Patrick The HPE Moonshot chassis is a deep one. Did yours extend like this....


(Source: HPE Moonshot Pron)
 

Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
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What depth racks are you using ?
Are the moonshots deeper than a c7000 chassis ?
Anyway I started to only use 1200 deep racks so they fit everything.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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I think they are 42" deep so it is a really tight fit. The biggest issue is that the zero U PDU gets in the way.