I measured another system at the office today looking at usage on a 2950 with Energy Smart power supplies, and L series processors (50W each). Idle usage was 2.1A, and when I pushed the system as hard as I could to light up 4 cores the system went to 2.9A of power. This is .3A higher than the PE2900 system […]
Time for some power measurements! ESXi was the hypervisor involved in the tests. System installed, 4 virtuals powered on, but not doing anything: 2.2A @115V System installed, 4 virtuals being installed hitting the I/O system: 2.4A @115V System installed, 4 virtuals pushing 100% CPU each, no tuning: 2.6A @115V While the virtuals were pushing the high CPU load, they were also hitting […]
Oh noes, part 3 is upon me and now I must be witty or informative. I am tired today, so I’ll try for informative. My PE2900 showed up today and has been put into the rack. I even have a silly picture of its guts… Wasn’t that nice? Say ‘yes’ please, it helps my ego a lot. Now onto the […]
Ah, the dreaded part 2 of the series. I ordered my test system from Dell on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008, and the box shipped on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008. I am excitedly waiting for it. The box I ordered is to test out the I/O performance for the mail server virtualization, the config is: Quad Core Xeon E5420, 2.5Ghz, 2x6MB […]
With things changing all over the marketplace, virtualization has, again, come to the forefront as the savior of the data center. And wouldn’t you know, I’d like to save my data center, at least some power and cooling needs. I have started to review how we use our servers and where we could do combining to save power, cooling, and […]
This past couple of days, I worked with our web guy as I redeployed our web cluster from FreeBSD 6.x-STABLE to FreeBSD 7.x-STABLE. We also moved from the rock solid and never failing (and now end of lifed) PHP4 to PHP5 along the way. My subjective view of FreeBSD 7 vs 6 on our web cluster gives me the feeling […]
Had a very busy week setting up some new customers with managed servers. I’ll be writing some documents about managed infrastructure in the coming weeks, but you can see one of my old posts that I did on my personal blog months ago to whet your appetite. Another of the issues that bothers me is large companies sticking it hard […]
It all starts with customer service. From there people will buy your <thing>. Today I talk about Apple. Last year I had a buzzing noise in my Mac Book Pro, read the support site, talked to the people on the phone, and finally brought it in. Problem with the inverter and it needs to be replaced. Grr, I don’t want […]