For my first install of VE 5.1 in early 2018 I bought 2 workstations HP Z420 with Xeon 1620 (8 core). First I got plenty of problems while installing. Flashing red lines in the first boot etc. After working hard on that I managed to install VE on that 2 servers.
Unfortunately I had to experience faults on both of these production machines.
A colleague of mine suggested to try another brand: Dell. So I got a used Workstation Dell Precision T3600 with a Xeon 1620. This time everthing went flawless. No red flashing lines, instant install and a much speedier server than ever. Even the WebGUI responds in no time; exactly opposite to the HP Z420 behaviour.
And today I looked at the CPU Usage of the one Z420 and the Dell T3600. With nearly equivalent loads of VMs there is 4 fold difference in the CPU load, with the Dell hovering around 1% to 2% , the HP 5% to 8%.
Now I want to dig into this. So I visited the driver site of their makers. And now I saw it: On the HP site many Bios Updates plus lots of drivers for Linux with info texts declaring "Fix of a bug causing kernel crash ..."
On the Dell site: no such a thing, only a minor Bios update, but not essential for Linux.
Now the question: Is it worth doing all this Bios and driver update stuff on a HP Z420? Has anybody worked this out to a reliable and well responding server?
Unfortunately I had to experience faults on both of these production machines.
A colleague of mine suggested to try another brand: Dell. So I got a used Workstation Dell Precision T3600 with a Xeon 1620. This time everthing went flawless. No red flashing lines, instant install and a much speedier server than ever. Even the WebGUI responds in no time; exactly opposite to the HP Z420 behaviour.
And today I looked at the CPU Usage of the one Z420 and the Dell T3600. With nearly equivalent loads of VMs there is 4 fold difference in the CPU load, with the Dell hovering around 1% to 2% , the HP 5% to 8%.
Now I want to dig into this. So I visited the driver site of their makers. And now I saw it: On the HP site many Bios Updates plus lots of drivers for Linux with info texts declaring "Fix of a bug causing kernel crash ..."
On the Dell site: no such a thing, only a minor Bios update, but not essential for Linux.
Now the question: Is it worth doing all this Bios and driver update stuff on a HP Z420? Has anybody worked this out to a reliable and well responding server?
