Potential Deal: 2 x Dual 2011 nodes @$199, Quanta Openrack

[smithse79]

My experience is with the quanta windmill
1) UK 240v will work fine.
2) Each side has one power and sata cable. If you need a second the power cable will be difficult to find and there isn't really a place to put more than 2 drives total (1 for each half).
3) Yes each half can be powered up independently. Small red button on the board is the power button. When power is applied they return to last state (turned on when power removed they will power on. Turned off when power was removed they will not power on).
4) RJ45 can be used as standard NIC
5) No one that I have seen has SAS working.
5 again) On the one that has the riser it should work as long as the power draw isn't excessively high.
6) If you want to run Windows or an OS the requires the newer features then get the Quanta. Are v2 CPUs worth the cost? (I got the cheap $55 2670v1) If not it shouldn't matter.

I'm gonna second what he said except the disk power cables, I found them on Aliexpress and ebay pretty easily. Granted they take weeks to ship from China but they do arrive and do work. Also, I'm using SSDs in mine and just have them stacked up in the disk area. Not secured at all. If I feel like they need to be, I can velcro them in later. If I were using spinning drives, I'd plan on something different however.

 

[craigdabbs]

thanks for the quick replies.

checking ebay there is not much of a difference between the v1 and v2 in the uk. Most of the cheap ones on there come from the hong kong. I take it its best to stay away from engineering samples with these boards?

 

[voxadam]

Has anyone even tried to bring the SAS controllers up?

 

[some1else]

thanks for the quick replies.

checking ebay there is not much of a difference between the v1 and v2 in the uk. Most of the cheap ones on there come from the hong kong. I take it its best to stay away from engineering samples with these boards?

I've tested with stepping QA8Z, QA8X and QDU4. With the firts 2 and bios A13 the board made to POST, although only with CPU 0. With 2 processors installed - it's a no go. When I used only one CPU with the first 2 steppings, the CPU worked only at 12x multiplier not ever trying to go higher and the node worked extremely slow - like such CPU should make about 750 Cinenebench points and it did ... 56. Very very slow.

Not sure what the situation was with QDU4 but as far as I can remember it didn't boot at all.

QA8X and QA8Z should be E5-2660 V1 ES processor and QDU4 should be 2640 V2.

Of course, it doesn't mean that there are no ES processors supported in this board.

 

[voxadam]

I wish I knew more about the dark art of BIOS/firmware modification; it would be especially helpful for boards like this that are no longer supported by the OEM/ODM. If nothing else, being able to determine what processors are blacklisted or whitelisted by the firmware would be a timesaver.

 

[chiuljnk]

Hi all, I just bought one. It came with "1x 10GbE ETHERNET MEZZANINE CARD PN# CX341A". What cable do I have to buy to connect the one mezzanine card on one node to the other node and do a node-to-node private network?

Thank you

 

[Gene]

Hi all, I just bought one. It came with "1x 10GbE ETHERNET MEZZANINE CARD PN# CX341A". What cable do I have to buy to connect the one mezzanine card on one node to the other node and do a node-to-node private network?

Thank you

Another cx341a mezanine card and a sfp+ 10gbit cable to connect them

 

[Gene]

so I have the most recent Wiwynn SV7210 bios for those of you that may want to try it. I ran into an issue where my LSI SAS9300-8e wasn't initializing. It was giving a bios 99 error and freezing on boot. After talking with Wiwynn, the 9300 isn't supported. I'm going to try upgrading my bios to see if that does anything.

Current bios i have loaded: EP_P09RG.01
Last bios Wiwynn made: EP_P09RG.02

Google drive link for firmware: EP_P09RG.02.zip

 

[voxadam]

@Gene, does your SV7210 have all the SAS ports mentioned in the original Open Compute Intel Motherboard v2.0 specification?[1] I ask because I know not all available hardware that was based on the "Windmill" spec has all hardware required for the features mentioned in that spec populated. That being said, I'm reasonably sure that the SAS ports are all powered by C602 PCH.

The way I read the Windmill spec it is that each board supports 10 SAS devices (two individual plus four each for the two miniSAS ports) without having to resort to a PCIe HBA. From page eight of the spec:

Serial-attached SCSI (SAS)/SATA ports:
◦ 2 individual SATA 6Gps ports from SATA port 0/1
◦ 1 mini-SAS port from SATA port 2/3/4/5
◦ 1 mini-SAS port from SAS port 0/1/2/3
◦ 1 mini-SAS port from SAS port 4/5/6/7, enabled by upgrade ROM (follow the Intel upgrade ROM design guide for implementation)

Is there an official manual from Wiwynn covering the SV7210? I know there's a manual for the SV7220 but its not clear to me in what way the two models differ.

Thanks,

Adam

[1] http://files.opencompute.org/oc/public.php?service=files&t=935ae31805d3e7a120bf5b0d08db819c&download

 

[Gene]

No there are empty headers on mobo for the sas ports but no hardware in place with the sv7210. Perhaps 7220 indicates with sas included.
Ive requested a copy of manual from my contact a wiwynn

 

[voxadam]

 

[Janiashvili]

thanks for the quick replies.

checking ebay there is not much of a difference between the v1 and v2 in the uk. Most of the cheap ones on there come from the hong kong. I take it its best to stay away from engineering samples with these boards?

Contacted the seller at eBay and got answer that they only support v1 CPUs, lets hear from others what experience they had with v2s

 

[chiuljnk]

Can someone tell me what order to fill the DIMM slots? I bought 8x DIMM's (4 per CPU) for each node, and there are 16 slots (8 for each CPU labeled #0 to #7).

Thank you.

 

[Gene]

I just filled them closest to cpu first then populated them away from cpu. Booted fine

 

[chiuljnk]

I just filled them closest to cpu first then populated them away from cpu. Booted fine

An update: I have discovered that this is not best way. White slots and black slots are on the same channel and there are 4 channels for each CPU.
0/1 - channel 0
2/3 - channel 1
4/5 - channel 2
6/7 - channel 3

So you would want to populate all the white slots first (0,2,4,6), then the black slots (1,3,5,7). If you populate them adjacent to each other, you would be putting DIMM's on the same channel and that hurts performance.

I confirmed this to be true by looking at DRAM Configuration in the BIOS.

 

[craigdabbs]

thanks for the quick replies.

checking ebay there is not much of a difference between the v1 and v2 in the uk. Most of the cheap ones on there come from the hong kong. I take it its best to stay away from engineering samples with these boards?

The only place to get one of these open compute systems is from the US which works out a lot of money to ship with custom charges. I have managed to pick up Intel R1304GZ4GC 1U system with 32gb and 2 x e5-2660 for 300 pounds. I thought this would save a lot of hassle sourcing different parts and it seemed like a pretty good deal with an upgrade path to V2 at a later date.

Thanks for answering my questions earlier it was much appreciated.

Craig

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

I've tested with stepping QA8Z, QA8X and QDU4. With the firts 2 and bios A13 the board made to POST, although only with CPU 0. With 2 processors installed - it's a no go. When I used only one CPU with the first 2 steppings, the CPU worked only at 12x multiplier not ever trying to go higher and the node worked extremely slow - like such CPU should make about 750 Cinenebench points and it did ... 56. Very very slow.

Not sure what the situation was with QDU4 but as far as I can remember it didn't boot at all.

QA8X and QA8Z should be E5-2660 V1 ES processor and QDU4 should be 2640 V2.

Of course, it doesn't mean that there are no ES processors supported in this board.

My QARF 2640 ES chip works. My two 8 core ES chips do not. QAMU/QB7B. Just for additional data points for anyone.

 

[chiuljnk]

Has anyone done a memtest86 (latest version 7.2) on this box? This is the UEFI version. It always hangs when it gets to Test 13 [Hammer Test], but never actually trigger an error. The running clock stops counting but it is not really hung because I can press 'c' and the configuration menu comes up. From that menu, I can choose Skip current test, and it'll move on to the next test. But otherwise, it just sits on this screen and does nothing. Both nodes do this, so i don't think i have a bad node.

 

[some1else]

Has anyone done a memtest86 (latest version 7.2) on this box? This is the UEFI version. It always hangs when it gets to Test 13 [Hammer Test], but never actually trigger an error. The running clock stops counting but it is not really hung because I can press 'c' and the configuration menu comes up. From that menu, I can choose Skip current test, and it'll move on to the next test. But otherwise, it just sits on this screen and does nothing. Both nodes do this, so i don't think i have a bad node.

+

That's why you use the multi threaded version of memtest, which is buggy. It happens more often on the new platforms, on a X58 dual board like Supermicro X8DTT works like charm, for example.

 

[Alex Bury]

Is it possible to run single node with atx power supply ?
I want to build server for nas and 2 or 3 vm.
I plan to bay node without cpus and memory. And use it with single Intel Xeon E5-2650L V2 QS QF6B.
+ LSI MegaRaid