ServeTheHome – Intel Xeon AMD Opteron RAID Controller Reviews

I recently posted about the Dell/ Silicom PEG6I six port Gigabit Ethernet adapter which I was able to get very inexpensively. One note I had was that I had yet to test it on ESXi 5.0 and I received a lot of e-mail on the subject. Unfortunately, I am in the process of clearing out a lot of old gear that I simply do not have room for and decided to build a new ESXi 5.0 test bed. Once that started working, I managed to find a free PCIe x8 electrical slot in the new server (dual Opteron 6128 platform for those wondering.) When I rebooted I found this: Continue Reading

One question I get asked often is how to make a desktop PC VMware ESXi ready. That question invariably differs from case to case (and I cannot answer all questions) but one of the best bits of advice I can give is to make sure you have at least one networks adapter supported in VMware ESXi. I will be doing a few of these pieces but will touch upon one of my old mainstays today, the Intel Pro/1000 PT Desktop single port adapter. For those wondering, these can be found inexpensively second hand, and will probably continue to do so as they come off of interactive support from Intel in mid-2012. See the Intel Pro/1000 PT ebay search. Continue Reading

Today we are looking at the ASUS P9X79 WS which is a workstation motherboard built around Intel’s X79 chipset and the LGA 2011 Sandy Bridge-E processors. Unlike the previously reviewed ASUS P9X79, this is a higher-end part, with a lot more functionality built-in. Unlike the base model, the ASUS P9X79 WS contains workstation-centric features such as additional PCIe slots and dual Intel network controllers that provide a lot of extra versatility. All of this versatility does mandate that the ASUS P9X79 WS is a big board measuring up to SSI CEB size specs. In this review, we will look at some of the features that make the board unique. Continue Reading

I have used many Intel Pro/1000 PT Quad network adapters to provide extra ports in servers for a few years now. They are well supported Intel 82571GB-based cards that are re-branded by Dell and other vendors. The big advantage to cards like these are that they allow users to add a lot of network ports into a single PCIe slot. While the Intel Pro/1000 line is well known, one other brand I found sold by a few vendors on ebay was the Silicom PEG6I six port network adapter. These cards are built around three Intel 82571EB controllers, each responsible for two ports on the back plane. I decided to try two of these cards out from online sources. Continue Reading

In my main workstation I have used a custom water cooling loop with a triple 120mm fan radiator since the Intel Core i7-920 came out. That loop is great, but requires a lot of maintenance. Not only that, the setup requires a lot of tubing inside the chassis so I decided to look at some of today’s closed loop liquid cooling solutions. I also decided to move to a new desktop chassis, a Corsair Carbide Series 500R. A quick search did not produce any good results for an installation guide for installing the Corsair H100 in the Carbide 500R, so I decided to write one up. Continue Reading

For those that store information on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage platform, good news, it is going to be a bit less expensive in the future to store things. Amazon has reduced pricing starting 1 February 2012 for the first 1PB of storage. Over the first PB, storage prices remain the same. Now with all of this said, it is quite expensive to use Amazon S3 as compared to many other services. Continue Reading

Intel will be launching the Xeon E5 series in the near future. The Xeon E5-1600 series CPUs are single socket only with three parts that look like their Core i7 desktop counterparts and have either four our six cores plus Hyper Threading. The high-end will be taken by the Xeon E5-4600 series, with the ’4′ denoting that the CPUs will be four socket capable. Probably the sweet spot for most readers on this site will be the Xeon E5-2400 and E5-2600 series. These CPUs will be both single and dual socket capable with the E5-2400 series having only one QPI link and three memory channels per LGA 1356 socket. The slightly higher-end here is the Xeon E5-2600 series which will utilize the LGA 2011 socket and therefore four memory channels per socket (one can see this in the X79 consumer platforms today.) Continue Reading

Over the past few weeks I have had the chance to play with some 8 core 16 thread Intel Sandy Bridge-EP based Xeon samples which will ultimately be part of the Xeon E5-2600 lineup. I will say that the turbo frequencies seem to be working a little strangely on these chips, but the one I am using for the benchmarks can maintain 3.1GHz across all eight cores quite nicely and the memory controller supports eight DIMM sockets fully populated. I figured I would share a preview of the Intel Xeon E5 series’ performance. Again, please see this as a preview so final shipping numbers should be a bit better. The most comparable Intel Xeon E5-2600 CPU is the Xeon E5-2687W which is a 3.1GHz 150w 8C/16T part designated for workstations. Yes, the new LGA 2011 dual socket Xeons are going to be expensive, but with AMD’s Bulldozer-based Opteron 6200 series CPUs putting out performance numbers well below expectations, Intel has a lot of leeway to price these for aggressive margins. I will also note however, that the AMD G34 platform still has some very compelling use cases, especially with 4P systems and using very low-end chips to build memcached 2P/ 4P servers. Continue Reading