Three Xeon Servers

[compudog]

I acquired three HP Proliant DL380 rack mount servers. One is a Gen 3 and two are Gen 4. THe Gen 3 has a 3.06 GHz Xeon with 1 GB of Ram and three 18.2 GB Ultra3 SCSI. The Gen 4's have a 3.0Ghz Xeon with 2GB RAM and three 18.2 GB Ultra3 SCSI drives. All three have redundant PSUs, slim CD-ROM drives and lots of noisy fans. Ideally I'd like to take the CPU, RAM, CPU Power module from one of the G4's and put it into the other for a 2 CPU, 4GB configuration.

I do not know what they were used for, my company took over ownership of a new manufacturing facility and these were left behind. The entire rack (86" high) was destined for the Dumpster. (I will try and salvage the KVM on my next visit.)

They all boot up, all SCSI drives show green lights, but nothing boots to an O/S. All show HP SmartArray that drive configuration has changed and gives me option to boot from CD/Floppy, Network.

I would love to run a DC project on one of these, but I am unsure how to start. On my next trip to the location, I will try and find documentation, but when the previous owners vacated, they left little documentation (and a bunch of Gateway PIII, Windows 98 machines) behind.

 

[PCTC2]

Hmmmm. This is a tough one. Well, I am just going to post here that I recently had a similar experience, but I cannot crunch on them. A room at my work recently changed departments to my department. We gave them 2 months to move out and when we moved in... there were 10 IBM dual-Xeon (NetBurst) 2.6GHz w/ 2GB of RAM and lots of SCSI and SATA drives (they were originally a ROCKS cluster). Now I get to un-cluster them and migrate some of our serving capabilities to them running CentOS 5 (because our 14 root servers are over-worked). Too bad I can't run anything on them (I tried borging a few computers a few months ago and I got noticed. I can run F@H only if I can get launch.d to run it from 8PM to 6AM only).

 

[theAnimal]

How about this?

 

[compudog]

OK. I pulled the CPU, Power Module and RAM from one of the G4 servers and put it into the other. Now I have a Dual Xeon 2U server with 4 GB of RAM. It boots, showing both CPUs and all 4GB of RAM. I don't need the data on any of the SCSI drives, so I guess I will boot to a Windows XP Pro CD and install that as an OS.

Would it be better to run one dual CPU server or two single CPU servers?
Is Win XP Pro my best OS choice? (I am not opposed to 'nix, I just have very little experience with it.)
What TeAm DC project would best utilize this configuration? (Dual CPU/4GB)
Should I even bother using the excess electricty of the 2U, 52 pound behemoth?

Comments greatfully appreciated.

 

[Markfw]

ubuntu is painless to setup, but a little tricky for smp. If you use winxp pro, do 2 smp clients.

 

[compudog]

I'm going with Windows Server 2003 as I cannot find SCSI array drivers for XP Pro. My next problem is finding a floppy disk to put the drivers on!

 

[compudog]

Bah! All this hardware going to waste. I cannot get an OS loaded. Windows XP can't load without SCSI drivers (I have the drivers on floppy, but the one floppy drive between the three servers is borked :|)

Edited for update. See below.

 

[compudog]

It's all good! Up and running! 2 HT Xeon cores crunching for the TeAm! Task Manager shows four CPU windows. All are currently at 100%!

 

[Denithor]

:thumbsup: