Running Promox on Intel 5520 or Intel 5500 series

[hisaltesse]

Has anyone successfully installed Proxmox 1.3 (or earlier) and a new server with Intel Nehalem 5500 series, especially the 5520 (2.26GHz)?

I am hearing some reports that it does not work. It would be great if we could use this thread to report different users experience with such a new platform.

 

[julianweber]

I don't know what sort of problems you are referring to but I have installed Proxmox VE on a Supermicro X8SAX motheroard with an I7-920 processor. Not exactly a xeon 5500 but they are in the same processor family. I am using an older Intel SCSI RAID controller with a pair of 32GB SCSI disks to boot from. So far it is working well but I am planning to create a storage pool on some SATA disks for the virtual machines.

Julian

 

[hisaltesse]

Thanks for your reply Julian.

Here is the configuration that I am interested in purchasing but I am not sure if it is going to work:

Supermicro SC815TQ-560UB
Supermicro X8DTU-F
2 x Intel Xeon E5520 2.26GHz Processor
SAS RAID 10 with Adaptec 2266800-R 5405Z

I have been talking to one vendor who was not able to get proxmox to run. They said that the server reboots after the installation and starts the process again.

 

[hisaltesse]

I am going for 4 x 450GB SAS to start with.
Still waiting for my order to arrive. I will post my finding on running proxmox on this server soon.

 

[hisaltesse]

Alright guys,

The server finally arrived. Loaded it with 4 x 450GB SAS seagate 15K RPM.

I had some issues installing Proxmox...
Here is my experience getting proxmox to work so far:

- installed the Proxmox 1.3 CDROM

- launched and configured one array of these 4 disks in RAID10 on the Adaptec 5405Z card through the card bios.

- then tried to boot off the CDROM into the proxmox CD, but the system COULD NOT boot.

- went back into the bios to change the SATA CDROM setting to emulate IDE. Then I was able to boot into Proxmox CD but proxmox failed to install because it could not find the CD-ROM drivers.

- so my next and last options over the past two days were to use an external CDROM or disk via USB or the IPMI (built-in KVM). I searched around and realized that I did not have an external USB CD-ROM player. And trying to restore the proxmox iso into a usb drive or a hard drive was a failure on the Mac...

So I ended up trying the IPMI - KVM. But again while I was able to view the screen of the server via the java applet, it would not open the java popup window when I selected the Virtual Media Wizard in an attempt to mount the iso from KVM.


So I downloaded Parallels for Mac, installed Windows on it, downloaded the java jre, accessed the server kvm IP again from the browser and everything was fine from there.

- so I mounted the proxmox iso file via the Virtual Media Wizard, rebooted and pressed F11 to select a boot option, then selected the USB CDROM and I was finally able to boot into Proxmox installer.

- so I went through the installer gui and it directly saw my 1 partition from the RAID10 and everything installed fine...

This is kinda long as a story but I hope it helps anyone who has to go through the same issues installing Proxmox on Intel Nehalem 5520.

More to come...

 

[hisaltesse]

So I got proxmox running on my all new Intel Nehalem 5520...

An initial run of pveperf gave me:

CPU BOGOMIPS: 72537.31
REGEX/SECOND: 636380
HD SIZE: 94.49 GB (/dev/pve/root)
BUFFERED READS: 550.41 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 3.60 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND: 3125.36
DNS EXT: 54.47 ms
DNS INT: 43.92 ms (here)


And a few more runs after installing 3 containers of 1GB and 20GB storage varied between 500 and 600+ MB/sec buffered reads.

This is sweet.

 

[hisaltesse]

One thing that I find rather odd though is that Proxmox is reporting the wrong number of CPUs.

CPU(s) 16 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5520 @ 2.27GHz

This is a dual Xeon 5520. Isn't this supposed to show 8 core total?

 

[Alp Özdemir]

Nothing wrong, just Xeon E5520 is a Hyper-Threading supported CPU

 

[hisaltesse]

So I ran some ab testing to see the performance of this beast and will post the results shortly...

Then after the tests I wanted to see what would happen if two hard drives failed.

So I pulled one hard drive tray out while the server was running and while it biped, everything worked fine (which is what we expect under raid 10)...

Then I pulled the second hard drive out and things started to fail...

I checked and the sites went down although I was still connected via ssh.

After a minute or so I put the hard drives back in and some vps came back up but the proxmox interface was on and off and then off...

So I rebooted the server and it when through some file system fixes and everything came back online...

Right now while the proxmox interface and the VPSs are up, the array seems to be rebuilding itself...

I just ran 3 pveperf separated by 3 to 5 mins and got on average a BUFFERED READS of 150MB/sec... which is great. So even when the RAID is under load I am getting 150MB/sec... and ZERO CPU overhead because I use the Adaptec 5405z instead of the internal intel raid controller.

See the results of pveperf below..


maison:~# pveperf
CPU BOGOMIPS: * * *74628.07
REGEX/SECOND: * * *641169
HD SIZE: * * * * * 94.49 GB (/dev/pve/root)
BUFFERED READS: * *153.93 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 5.29 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND: * * 2184.82
DNS EXT: * * * * * 54.77 ms
DNS INT: * * * * * 44.05 ms (here)


maison:~# pveperf
CPU BOGOMIPS: * * *74628.07
REGEX/SECOND: * * *638675
HD SIZE: * * * * * 94.49 GB (/dev/pve/root)
BUFFERED READS: * *150.00 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 4.56 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND: * * 1872.83
DNS EXT: * * * * * 52.73 ms
DNS INT: * * * * * 44.76 ms (here)


maison:~# pveperf
CPU BOGOMIPS: * * *74628.07
REGEX/SECOND: * * *629650
HD SIZE: * * * * * 94.49 GB (/dev/pve/root)
BUFFERED READS: * *150.83 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 4.58 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND: * * 2067.53
DNS EXT: * * * * * 521.48 ms
DNS INT: * * * * * 370.18 ms (here)

 

[hisaltesse]

Proxmox performance on Intel Nehalem 5520.
ab benchmark, 100,000 hit at 200 hits per seconds on 4 containers...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=capkaVpHWS0

 

[ictdude]

I use a X8STi Supermicro but it seems that there is a big IO Delay.
I think its a driver problem.

This board use a 82801JI (ICH10 Family) 4 port SATA IDE Controller.
But i see that there is a upgrade to PM 1.4 and also this a driver update is there:

ich10 updates for Nehalem (corei7) based systems. i hope this will fix my problem. I will try ..

 

[hisaltesse]

I use a X8STi Supermicro but it seems that there is a big IO Delay.
I think its a driver problem.

This board use a 82801JI (ICH10 Family) 4 port SATA IDE Controller.
But i see that there is a upgrade to PM 1.4 and also this a driver update is there:

ich10 updates for Nehalem (corei7) based systems. i hope this will fix my problem. I will try ..

Where is the url to the driver update you are referring to?
I am not sure if this applies to us even though we run a RAID controller for the drives that is directly attached through pci...

 

[ictdude]

Where is the url to the driver update you are referring to?
I am not sure if this applies to us even though we run a RAID controller for the drives that is directly attached through pci...

It looks that it comes with Proxmox VE 1.4 http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Roadmap

And i use this controller ,its on the mainboard of my X8STi Supermicro
I use software Raid. if you dont have this controller its not for you i gues.
Because i have high IO Delays with this controller and could be it is solved in version VE 1.4. Well in my case Because in release 1.4 there is a update for ich10 for Nehalem (corei7) based systems. I believe They talk about the 82801JI and other (ICH10 Family) 4 port SATA IDE Controller. And gues other stuff using this Chipset. And other related to the ICH10 Family.I hope it will fix my problem with this update.

My stats:

pveperf
CPU BOGOMIPS: 42562.16
REGEX/SECOND: 408928
HD SIZE: 19.38 GB (/dev/md1)
BUFFERED READS: 86.24 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 9.92 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND: 669.22
DNS EXT: 32.12 ms
DNS INT: 1.67 ms