Been some time ago since I posted here but as of lately I have been browsing here more often and getting back into enterprise toys. I have been out for some time because work kind of sucked the joy out of things, but after some school projects I caught myself looking on eBay and the likes more often.
While browsing I found a listing in Belgium for 2 Asus Z9PH-D16/QDR boards for a price of 50 euro. I made the guy an offer of 35 euro thinking he would never accept until he did haha. He then sent me an email saying he also still had a 3rd board still in the node, and if I wanted it for 35 euro. I also got him to send some cheap memory with it. That totaled to 140 euro-ish.
I purchased two 2609 v1's because I still had one laying around. Also, 2 cheap Chenbro heatsinks and an HP DPS-1200FB 1200w PSU, which totaled about 50 euro. I'm planning to use the HP PSU to power all the systems. I plan on doing this with one of them miner adapter boards for this PSU, which cost me 23 euro.
The thought behind that specific PSU is the adapter boards are stupid cheap, so is the PSU itself and it should be able to pull all the systems. The boards have 20pin ATX connectors which just consist of 8x ground, 8x 12v+, PSU_ON, and 5vstb. The DPS-1200FB doesn't do 5v standby but it does have a 12v standby. So the idea is to solder a buck-converter to that pin and power the systems that way. I will have to make some custom connectors but that should not be an issue.
Now you might ask: What do you need all this for? To which I would say: No freaking clue, just like messing around. Normally I do whatever I need to do on my Intel P4000 WS but that's starting to get a little big for my student room and loud. I also do prefer having multiple ESXi nodes with a proper vCenter instead of virtualizing everything in on my WS from a single disk.
I will be using an old ThinkPad T430 with I7 and 12gb memory with ESXi as a vCenter server and for small management tasks because its low power and quiet.
So here are the pictures
:
Boards and the rest of the toys arrived.
Test fitting all the boards the way I want to stack them. Would still have to make some custom stuff for the PSU and possibly the drives
Testing all the boards and updating the BIOS.
During testing, even though I will only use one of the CPU's this is what I noticed on socket 2 of one of the boards. The board still in the node also somewhat died of mysterious reasons. It went from working fine while I was struggling with a defective DIMM to dead no matter what I did. CMOS reset, different BIOS chip, different CPU other memory, nothing worked. So I tried one last thing, I filled the second socket and installed one DIMM for CPU2, and low and behold it booted just fine. Moved the memory back to CPU1 and again no POST. I messaged the seller about this, the defective DIMM, and the socket and he was kind enough to offer me a refund of 70 euro. While doing some more testing with that board I did get it to boot, but with only one DIMM in D1 on CPU1. Whenever I would add a second one it would just stop POSTing.
Macgyver an ATX PSU to test the boards with the 8pin CPU connector.
So that's where I'm at right now. Still waiting on the PSU adapter boards from China, from there I can boot all the systems all at once and make a plan from there. I also still have some decisions to make regarding switches and case materials.
While browsing I found a listing in Belgium for 2 Asus Z9PH-D16/QDR boards for a price of 50 euro. I made the guy an offer of 35 euro thinking he would never accept until he did haha. He then sent me an email saying he also still had a 3rd board still in the node, and if I wanted it for 35 euro. I also got him to send some cheap memory with it. That totaled to 140 euro-ish.
I purchased two 2609 v1's because I still had one laying around. Also, 2 cheap Chenbro heatsinks and an HP DPS-1200FB 1200w PSU, which totaled about 50 euro. I'm planning to use the HP PSU to power all the systems. I plan on doing this with one of them miner adapter boards for this PSU, which cost me 23 euro.
The thought behind that specific PSU is the adapter boards are stupid cheap, so is the PSU itself and it should be able to pull all the systems. The boards have 20pin ATX connectors which just consist of 8x ground, 8x 12v+, PSU_ON, and 5vstb. The DPS-1200FB doesn't do 5v standby but it does have a 12v standby. So the idea is to solder a buck-converter to that pin and power the systems that way. I will have to make some custom connectors but that should not be an issue.
Now you might ask: What do you need all this for? To which I would say: No freaking clue, just like messing around. Normally I do whatever I need to do on my Intel P4000 WS but that's starting to get a little big for my student room and loud. I also do prefer having multiple ESXi nodes with a proper vCenter instead of virtualizing everything in on my WS from a single disk.
I will be using an old ThinkPad T430 with I7 and 12gb memory with ESXi as a vCenter server and for small management tasks because its low power and quiet.
So here are the pictures
:
Boards and the rest of the toys arrived.
Test fitting all the boards the way I want to stack them. Would still have to make some custom stuff for the PSU and possibly the drives
Testing all the boards and updating the BIOS.
During testing, even though I will only use one of the CPU's this is what I noticed on socket 2 of one of the boards. The board still in the node also somewhat died of mysterious reasons. It went from working fine while I was struggling with a defective DIMM to dead no matter what I did. CMOS reset, different BIOS chip, different CPU other memory, nothing worked. So I tried one last thing, I filled the second socket and installed one DIMM for CPU2, and low and behold it booted just fine. Moved the memory back to CPU1 and again no POST. I messaged the seller about this, the defective DIMM, and the socket and he was kind enough to offer me a refund of 70 euro. While doing some more testing with that board I did get it to boot, but with only one DIMM in D1 on CPU1. Whenever I would add a second one it would just stop POSTing.
Macgyver an ATX PSU to test the boards with the 8pin CPU connector
. So that's where I'm at right now. Still waiting on the PSU adapter boards from China, from there I can boot all the systems all at once and make a plan from there. I also still have some decisions to make regarding switches and case materials.
