Who has experience with Supermicro motherboards and Proxmox

[Nick Stuebig]

Good day,

We want to start a Proxmox virtualization in our firm.
Here, the proposed hardware for about 12 virtual servers and HA:
- 2 x 6 core Xeons per host
- 128 gig Ram Per Host
- 10 TB NAS (I-SCSI 10GB on-Lan)

Someone already has experience with a similar configuration?
Which motherboard (manufacturer, type and bios would be great) would you recommend?
Is there a database / list of already tested hardware?

Thank you in advance for your effort

 

[marotori]

I have used supermicro - no major issue on that front.

My only thoughts on your config at present.

ISCSI
Performance of any system is critical. It all comes down to disk io.
ISCSI can look good, but be aware that you are limited by your Ethernet speed. You MUST go down the route of jumbo frames, and bonded Ethernet cards if you want to get anything near local disk speeds.

RAM
The ram quantity you have is great. But will be limited if your disk io is not good enough. Essentially if you dont get enough disk io, you will not be able to load up the machines - in effect meaning you will not use all your ram! (this all depends on the number and type of machines you are running)

-
I have found that personally I get best performance on a modest budget with the following:

2 x quad core cpu
4-6 raid 10 disk array. (Lately I have been using Seagate Hybrid drives. They perform rather well)
Disk volume configured to use noatime,data=writeback
LSI Raid - 512MB ram - Write & ADRA caching.
64GB ram


We only run openvz, and this setup scales rather well.


Apart from this... I would STRONGLY suggest you buy only one box to start with and test test test. It is difficult to get your money back if things done work

Rob

 

[hotwired007]

ISCSI
Performance of any system is critical. It all comes down to disk io.
ISCSI can look good, but be aware that you are limited by your Ethernet speed. You MUST go down the route of jumbo frames, and bonded Ethernet cards if you want to get anything near local disk speeds.

I am working with a MD3200i 4*1GB and using jumbo frames ahs proven to be hit and miss with results.

Also look at multipathing instead of bonding - it may prove more effective although the 10GB link on active/backup would out perform my 4*1GB connection anyway!

 

[udo]

Good day,

We want to start a Proxmox virtualization in our firm.
Here, the proposed hardware for about 12 virtual servers and HA:
- 2 x 6 core Xeons per host
- 128 gig Ram Per Host
- 10 TB NAS (I-SCSI 10GB on-Lan)

Someone already has experience with a similar configuration?
Which motherboard (manufacturer, type and bios would be great) would you recommend?
Is there a database / list of already tested hardware?

Thank you in advance for your effort

Hi,
marotori is right - testing is very important because you can't avoid all problems.

I have some Supermicro boards and I'm not very happy with this crappy stuff...
128G Ram seems to be enough (in dependencies to the 12 cores).
I have an IScsi-raid with 10GB wich don't performs on our Servers (performance drop to kb/s), so that I use this raid from an Server with only 1GB-Nic (performs well) and the second Raid with 1GB-Nic is used by the 10GB-Servers... sounds bad (and is)!
In therory is all ok, but not in practice...

Udo

 

[andydills]

Take a look at my thread, I'm really happy with the Supermicro chassis I picked out:

http://forum.proxmox.com/threads/12...are-details-suggestions-for-edits-to-the-wiki

 

[e100]

I have been running four Supermicro X9DRL-3F-O boards for a few months with no issues.
They support two processors but we are running them with only one E5-2650 and four 16GB Kingson ECC modules KVR16R11D4/16

 

[e100]

Hi,
I have some Supermicro boards and I'm not very happy with this crappy stuff...

I have purchased lots of SuperMicro gear over the years and had the occasional weird issue.
In all instances they did provide me with BIOS updates to fix my problems.
I think someone else in this forum mentioned that they felt SuperMicro has buggy BIOS.

 

[tux]

have 7 years experience with supermicro boards and casssis. yeah - some bios have bugs - but it is the general problem of some chipsets. look at standard boards - no special things - and you get a well supported and very proffesional server hardware. i have 80% amd - no problems since 3 years with proxmox.