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Jasemccarty
Immortal
Immortal

Dell Poweredge 4400 - ESXi 3.5 Update 2 Refresh - Add it to the list

Well, I know this is an old box, but I figured I'd try it out.

I just installed ESXi 3.5.0 Update 2 Refresh on an old Dell Poweredge 4400. A couple months ago I installed ESX 3.5.0 on it as well.

The box has dual 933MHz procs, and almost 4GB of RAM.

I will mention that the onboard nic wasn't recognized, and the ad-in nic that I'm using, I can't elaborate on right now, as I can't get to it. But needless to say... Dave, add another one to your list.

And here's the lspci output:

00:00.0 Host bridge: ServerWorks CNB20LE Host Bridge (rev 06)

00:00.1 Host bridge: ServerWorks CNB20LE Host Bridge (rev 06)

00:06.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage IIC (rev 7a)

00:0f.0 ISA bridge: ServerWorks OSB4 South Bridge (rev 50)

00:0f.2 USB Controller: ServerWorks OSB4/CSB5 OHCI USB Controller (rev 04)

00:11.0 Host bridge: ServerWorks CNB20LE Host Bridge (rev 06)

00:11.1 Host bridge: ServerWorks CNB20LE Host Bridge (rev 06)

06:04.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 80960RM (rev 01)

06:04.1 RAID bus controller: Dell Computer Corporation PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controller 3/Di (rev 01)

07:06.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AIC-7880U (rev 02)

08:06.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9 (rev 08)

Cheers.

BTW, Dave, I think I'm in the lead for the slowest box...

Jase McCarty

Co-Author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center

(ISBN:1420070274) from Auerbach

Jase McCarty - @jasemccarty
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4 Replies
Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

Definitely the oldest / slowest so far. But I do have an HP LT6000r - 700 MHz running 2.5 that may need an upgrade Smiley Happy

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nick_couchman
Immortal
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That's encouraging - I have a couple older servers of about that flavor that I may have to give it a shot on!

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TechFreakZ
Contributor
Contributor

Hello Jase,

I'm very interested in your post regarding running ESXi on some elderly PE4400 servers.

We have two of these boxes at work (Dual 800MHz Xeons and Dual 1GHz Xeon's, both with 4GB Ram and onboard Dell PERC controllers). And my own PE4400 of the same spec as the dual 1GHz server at home . I've installed the very latest ESXi 3.5 on all of them and it goes on just fine and detects the onboard NIC too.

The question I have is that disk access seems failry slow (as in as little as 2MB/s when running HDTune on a Win 2008 server VM on the Dual 1GHz Xeon Server). I currently run RAID 5 across 8 disks that are brand new 73GB Fujitus 15Krpm SCSI SCA drives. I have also seen this slow access from an Ubuntu 8.04 server VM too.

On the Dual 800MHz server I am runnning 8 x 18Gb 10Krpm disks and have used the RAID controller to create a number of different arrays to ascertain whether the slow disk access is a function of the type of RAID volume configuration. I've created RAID stripe (8K, 16K, 32K, 64K), RAID 5 (8K, 16K, 32K, 64K)and RAID 10 stripe/mirror (32K, 64K) arrays. And intend to run some more benchmarking on these to see if there is an optimal configuration.

Have you seen the same slow disk access? Or have any pointers where I can go and do some more work on?

Best regards

Alex

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TechFreakZ
Contributor
Contributor

Hello Jase,

Here's some promising test results for the elderly PowerEdge 4440 - there's life in the old box yet!

Server Hardware Configuration:

Dell Power Edge 4400

Dual 1GHz Xeon

4Gb ECC RAM

Dual Channel Scsi Backplane (4x2)

8 x Fugitsu 73Gb 15Krpm Hard Disks

Perc 4/Dc Raid Controller 128Mb Cache, Battery Backup Unit

1 x Intel Pro 1000 Dual port NIC.

2 x Netgear FA311 NIC's

1 x Onboard Intel 100Mbit NIC

RAID Configuration:

RAID Type: 0 & 5

RAID Stripe Size: 16 - 128Kb

RAID Write Cache: Write Back

RAID Read Cache: Adaptive

Disk Access: Direct IO

Disk Size: All disks are 20Gb raid volumes on the controller.

VMWare Configuration:

ESXi 3.5.0 110271 (Update 2) installed to a locally hosted virtual disk (vmhba0:0:0).

1 x VM running Windows 2008 Server on a 10Gb locally hosted virtual disk (vmhba0:1:0 also used for the first disk in

test).

There is one 10Gb VMware virtual disk created within in each 20Gb RAID disk.

The results are compiled in the attached PDF.

Best regards

Alex

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