ASUS fans help me go shopping!

A

altrutech

New Member
Dec 30, 2009
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The Server Closet
Hello, I'm new at this, I am looking to buy some dedicated hardware for my engineer to use for his Proxmox environment.

I have been a fan of ASUS since '97, can I get a `holler-back` from the forum participants who are HAPPY with their ASUS (AMD or Intel)?

I'd like to collect a list of motherboard candidates to choose from.
I am aready aware that not all CPUs support V.
I am looking for ASUS motherboards that people have been happy with.

Thanks to all in advance.
 
altrutech said:
Hello, I'm new at this, I am looking to buy some dedicated hardware for my engineer to use for his Proxmox environment.

I have been a fan of ASUS since '97, can I get a `holler-back` from the forum participants who are HAPPY with their ASUS (AMD or Intel)?

I'd like to collect a list of motherboard candidates to choose from.
I am aready aware that not all CPUs support V.
I am looking for ASUS motherboards that people have been happy with.

Thanks to all in advance.
Click to expand...

we started to collect some infos,
see http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Category:Hardware
 
altrutech said:
Hello, I'm new at this, I am looking to buy some dedicated hardware for my engineer to use for his Proxmox environment.

I have been a fan of ASUS since '97, can I get a `holler-back` from the forum participants who are HAPPY with their ASUS (AMD or Intel)?

I'd like to collect a list of motherboard candidates to choose from.
I am aready aware that not all CPUs support V.
I am looking for ASUS motherboards that people have been happy with.

Thanks to all in advance.
Click to expand...

Hi,
i'm satisfied with the M4A78T-E - with the 2.6.32-kernel the onbord-nic will reconice (but i have used e1000 yet). And - very important - you can use ECC-Ram - so you get a cheap "low-level-enterprise-ready server".
Due to the onboard-video, you need no extra graficcard.

Udo
 
I've been an asus fan too, but when I saw that they was starting to attack GNU/Linux, I've decided that I will no buy their products no longer.
http://www.osnews.com/story/21589/Asus_Microsoft_Launch_Anti-Linux_Netbook_Campaign
http://www.itsbetterwithwindows.com/
I do love Free Software, and can't stand someone that is against me and so proxy with someone that wants to destroy me (M$).
Free Software is not just a matter to have a different OS or program, is a way of thinking about society, culture, human nature and future. And since software is more and more pervasive in our life, without Free Software we can't be free in more and more aspects or our life.
If you find a MB that is NOT asus and works well for you, put in the wiki, will be one I will pick up in the next buy :)
 
I'm happy with the Asus RS700D-E6/PS8 Duo Nodes 1U server we are now using at our colo. Having two powerful Proxmox servers in a 1U chassis is really nice.

Server Hardware (Node 1 & Node 2)


  • 8 CPU Core - Intel Xeon E5506 Nehalem 2.13GHz
  • 24 Gb 1333 MHz ECC - DDR3
  • LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i
  • 2TB RAID 10 (4 drives)

The setup works quite well with DRBD which eliminates the redundancy expenses and complexity of NAS/SAN supporting NFS/iSCSI for previous VMware infrastructure. Getting rid of all of the other physical gear is going to save us a bunch of money on power usage in 2010. That should afford my budget some extra room to buy pre-purchased Proxmox support tickets once the 2.6.32 kernel moves to the supported branch. ;)

We may switch out the LSI 9260-4i with an Adaptec card since the 9260 requires a newer MegaRAID_SAS driver than is supported by the bare metal Proxmox 1.4 kernel. I'm worried that the comparable Adaptec SATA RAID cards will produce too much heat, though. We are running a few Adaptec RAIDs in the office server room and their heatsinks are scary hot. Thankfully, they are in large chassis and located near rear fan.
 
Ninjix said:
I'm happy with the Asus RS700D-E6/PS8 Duo Nodes 1U server we are now using at our colo. Having two powerful Proxmox servers in a 1U chassis is really nice.

Server Hardware (Node 1 & Node 2)


  • 8 CPU Core - Intel Xeon E5506 Nehalem 2.13GHz
  • 24 Gb 1333 MHz ECC - DDR3
  • LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i
  • 2TB RAID 10 (4 drives)

The setup works quite well with DRBD which eliminates the redundancy expenses and complexity of NAS/SAN supporting NFS/iSCSI for previous VMware infrastructure. Getting rid of all of the other physical gear is going to save us a bunch of money on power usage in 2010. That should afford my budget some extra room to buy pre-purchased Proxmox support tickets once the 2.6.32 kernel moves to the supported branch. ;)

We may switch out the LSI 9260-4i with an Adaptec card since the 9260 requires a newer MegaRAID_SAS driver than is supported by the bare metal Proxmox 1.4 kernel. I'm worried that the comparable Adaptec SATA RAID cards will produce too much heat, though. We are running a few Adaptec RAIDs in the office server room and their heatsinks are scary hot. Thankfully, they are in large chassis and located near rear fan.
Click to expand...

cool setup - never saw such a bunch of power in a 1HE solution.

do you run only KVM guests?
 
mmenaz, I appreciate your boycott, but I'm still an ASUS fan.
Ninjix, I am so jealous! I think I actually drooled the first time I saw the
Z8NH-D12 MB on their website. Too rich for me today, maybe next year.

anyone happy with any of the ASUS CSM models?

Thanks all, please keep these ASUS systems coming!
 
I'm also running two ASUS Z8NA-D6C boards with great results in the office server room. These are hosting VM for our dev team. They are ATX form factor so you have a lot of flexibility in chassis selection. Onboard "fake RAID" isn't useful so I added an Adaptec 2258100-R PCI-Express.
 
Just have to comment here. I use kvm only and am about to buy a new server. Lean towards a dual e5520 on a z8pe-d12x mb.
Have a choice between the adaptec 5805z or the lsi 9260-8i.

If i use the new kvm only kernels, do i have proper 9260 support then.
What would you guys recommend chosing?
 
I'm planning to go with Adaptec for our next server build based on the RS700D-E6/PS8.

The LSI 2960 line requires megaraid_sas module > 4.1 which means you need the PVE 2.6.32 kernel. It required some Clonezilla trickery to get Proxmox installed and running on entirely 2960-4i RAID 10 volume.
 
baserz said:
Just have to comment here. I use kvm only and am about to buy a new server. Lean towards a dual e5520 on a z8pe-d12x mb.
Have a choice between the adaptec 5805z or the lsi 9260-8i.

If i use the new kvm only kernels, do i have proper 9260 support then.
What would you guys recommend chosing?
Click to expand...

Hi,
i know only lsi-onboard-raids, but there are very bad!!
If i had a chance i will get another product. Btw. i'm happy with areca.

Udo
 
The LSI 9260 is no lowend onboard raid card and what ive seen sofar most ppl seem to like it. Probably its a matter what you pay for as usual.

Am still trying to decide wich card but its hard. What ive concluded sofar.

5805z: Stable and overall very solid, fast, works practically everywhere.

9260: FAST, 6gb, probably not as mature as the 5805, and not as universially supported. Why cant anything be a nobrainer ... sigh :)
 
Ninjix, have you run proxmox on your 9260 card? If so how did you feel it worked? And how did you percieve it in general?
 
The LSI 9260-4i are performing well with the 2.6.32 kernel. Here are some pveperf results from on of the machine nodes. Note that the server was hosting 4 KVM (avg 500 KB/s IOPs baseline) at the time I ran the test.

Code: 
node-a:~# pveperf
CPU BOGOMIPS:      34134.62
REGEX/SECOND:      785833
HD SIZE:           12.30 GB (/dev/mapper/pve-root)
BUFFERED READS:    205.89 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 9.77 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND:     3308.80
DNS EXT:           70.87 ms
DNS INT:           0.67 ms
The systems are currently each running RAID 5 on four Hitachi Travelstar HD20500 IDK/7K drives. These are retail drives designed for laptops and are the weak link in performance. I'll begin replacing these with SAS drives as my budget improves and the price drops on large capacity 2.5" form factor SAS. For now the current setup is adequate to host a KVM SQL 2005 server averaging with AVG 1.5 MB/s IOPs plus several other supporting Windows web servers and Linux machines.

Strangely, I found the 9260's RAID 5 write-back performance 25 Mb/s faster than RAID 10. This may be related to the disks not being designed for RAID use. It could possibly be the LSI megaraid_sas.ko module. LSI has version 4.01 checked in with 2.6.32 Linux Kernel but shows a 4.17 version on their website.

Managing the 9260 can be done from the command line using the static compiled MegaCli64 binary available from LSI.

Useful MegaCli links:
http://ftzdomino.blogspot.com/2009/03/some-useful-megacli-commands.html
http://www.kaltenbrunner.cc/blog/in...MegaRAID-SAS-and-the-self-explaining-CLI.html
 
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