I'm going to have to play with this when I get home. Although in the end I am not overly concerned as I am planning on building an enclosed, sound deadening rack for some of my gear.
HP S6500 and SL230s Gen8 - CRAZY deal
- Thread starter MiniKnight
- Start date
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Ah yes I remember reading about that in your blog. Meant to ask you about it but forgot.
I really liked the S6500 and SL390s blades, but the noise was a bit higher than I liked. Not terrible, but not ideal for me. The performance for the footprint was unbeatable for a home lab. Running vSAN with enterprise SSDs on Infiniband was screaming fast compared to NFS, even with the slow 6G controllers.
I ultimately decided to go another direction, but only because I had a pile of R715s at my disposal. #firstworldproblems
If anyone is interested, PM me and I'll make you a great deal on the blade chassis and blades with the Infiniband/10G cards, and I'll even throw in a pile of hex core L5640s. It's literally collecting dust on my basement floor. Also, DaSaint's is probably available too - and if you're really looking for a deal ask me about buying both, we could probably throw them on a pallet and ship them together.
I ultimately decided to go another direction, but only because I had a pile of R715s at my disposal. #firstworldproblems
If anyone is interested, PM me and I'll make you a great deal on the blade chassis and blades with the Infiniband/10G cards, and I'll even throw in a pile of hex core L5640s. It's literally collecting dust on my basement floor. Also, DaSaint's is probably available too - and if you're really looking for a deal ask me about buying both, we could probably throw them on a pallet and ship them together.
That is the plan. It will be a few months though most likely. I have so many projects going on that is not even funny.
Not a fan of 1366 (sell trying to get rid of C6100s) but if you have 2011s is gladly take them off. Like your cards as well..
haha not really, dell had a blunder with it, no sata 6gb speed. only the C6220 II does and it's a rarity. chassis and nodes have to both match too otherwise the nodes will POST but front panel health indicators will always be orange and fans will not ramp down. for those who would say they would buy C6220 for compute/network boot might as well just buy an S6500 chassis since all the front hot swap bays would be wasted.It is but C6220 is even better
You could have 3 nodes on network boot whilst the last one takes all 24 front bays as a SAN. Can't do that with the 6500
You will be limited by the gigabit network ports. If you want to use all 24 bays on one node you will need two hbas. And very long breakout cables, that can go from one corner of the chassis to the other. Because way c6220 works is it passes the onboard ports through the midplane. And it only has 6 ports. Its not even worth doing. Anyway, one node having all 24 bays doesn't really make that node a SAN, more like NAS. An S6500 would actually be better for SAN if you used all the nodes in hyperconverged manner, even if bays aren't hot swap, you can put one in maintenance mode depending on the software, remove the node, swap drives, and boot back up. Not a huge inconvenience.
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This is basically my plan. I don't think it is going to be very difficult to make drive racks for the sleds that can hold a total of 8x 7mm or 9.5mm drives to connect to the SAS2308 controller. If you were ambitious enough I bet you could do it with 15mm drives as well. Combine that with an NVMe drive in the left PCIe slot and the Mellanox FlexLOM FDR card, one port in QDR IB mode and one in 10G Ethernet mode, and you would have a hell of a setup.
Stick FreeNAS on it and you can run it as a SAN. Technically.. And dual 10GbE cards cost like $40 each.
Doesn't the C6220 have dynamic drive allocation? I was under the impression you could just assign all the unused drives to a single node. That's what I've read, haven't been able to play with one myself.
Hello,
I also ordered one unit of this machine and it arrived today. Unfortunately, the packaging materials were completely damaged, and some stuff might be missing.
Could anyone provide a list of items delivered with the chassis so I can contact with the seller? Could anyone give me some advice on dealing with such situation? Thanks!
Here are some photos of this terrible shipping:
Dropbox - HP_Proliant
I also ordered one unit of this machine and it arrived today. Unfortunately, the packaging materials were completely damaged, and some stuff might be missing.
Could anyone provide a list of items delivered with the chassis so I can contact with the seller? Could anyone give me some advice on dealing with such situation? Thanks!
Here are some photos of this terrible shipping:
Dropbox - HP_Proliant
What you have looks complete, except we can't see what you have for nodes. The system should have come with all 16 heat sinks (8 x #1 and 8 x #2 variants).
For those of you that are struggling to find a proper working SAS/SATA cable to enable the on-board H220i HBA, I managed to find the proper cable from HP. Here's the part numbers:
HP P/N: 657656-001
HP SPARE NO: 671338-001
HH P/N: 4N5Q4-01 D
I managed to find the cables on Amazon at a decent price of $39.50:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00G2FM3PC/
Pictures:
Yes, as already stated, you can severely bend the stock cable so that it barely squeaks by and fits when you slide the node into the chassis, but spending $40 on the proper cable is cheap insurance against breaking the stock one OR the motherboard connector over time. I don't understand why this cable is not listed in the QuickSpecs PDF for the sl230s, but whatever.
Apparently not. At least for the 12xLFF. That just bit me in the ass big time. I wanted 2 nodes of 6 drives running hyperconverged software, and a third compute node. AFAIK, there are 3 drives per node. (And I'm not running raid5) so that's actually 2 drives per node.
Anyone wanna buy a loaded C6220?
