So the formula team (see sig) got some servers donated to us for remote solving and file storage. Our computer scientist is graduating and no one really knows this stuff (even him, really, but it all defaulted to him to figure out).
Since I’m in charge of the electrons and have an interest in this stuff I’ve decided to get this done.
Can anyone provide and info/links/books/ect that will help me set these up?
We have 5 SuperServer 6016T servers, all need hard drives and the remote access cards.
I’m in the process of acquiring a server rack so we can put these safely in the basement here at school. We could put them in the schools server room but then we don’t have 24/7 access to them and we aren’t comfortable with that because if something happens over the weekend we are screwed.
I would worry about cooling and power if you don’t use the schools datacenter
They sell KVMs and HP servers have iLO ports to let you remotely manage servers so you don’t need physical access unless you have some hardware blow up…iLO will let you force hardware level reboot and give you console access
However you need to go from hardware(raid) config all the way into server setup and config pretty large breadth of knowledge for a beginner…
I will try and find some links for you tomorrow… If you have any specific questions I am more then willing to help I also end up at RIT a lot working with their computer security program so I could lend a hand.
We are going from a pc-based server to multiple servers so everything is new basically. We dont have a switch persay but one will be acquired once we have everything together to hook up the other servers.
Right now me and one of the other guys are going to put the old hard drive into one of the servers and try to get it to boot as we need to be operational soon. He kinda acts like he knows what’s going on but I’m still skeptical.
I’ll update as I go. Thanks for helping and definitely let me know the next time you are here.
No such thing…Either 2003, 2008, 2008 R2. From the first post you only need this to do storage? Do you have Domain Admin rights to join these to the domain? What’s your licensing situation for Windows Server?
The HP iLO stuff is nice, some servers even have the panel on the front that will tell you what’s failing.
So the HD he put in there is recognized by bios but not windows server install. might be a dead hd, I’ll have to investigate it more.
Questions:
-best HD’s to put in these? we will probably want 2 or 3 in each to do some sort of raid
-someone mentioned the remote access card so we can reboot and what not remotely, what are these technically called so I can research them? any suggestions?
LOL Ethernet cards? All you really need is Remote Desktop enabled, with 2008 there is a security feature that either allows all types of machines to connect or Anything Vista and Newer to connect. If you really want you can do Wake On Lan in case the server gets shutdown.
From the specs it looks like it takes 2.5" SATA drives and does pretty much all your basic RAID levels. I’m still unsure if this is just a fancy file share server or an application server or what.
Getting them racked and wired up isn’t as hard as it sounds. Hopefully you have all of the rails for the boxes. You mentioned that you will be getting a switch. What about getting power into the rack?
It’s going to take some time to get the thing setup right. Take it in small steps. If you try to do too much too fast you will undoubtedly fuck it up.
In terms of installing software, the RAID setup will probably have the steepest learning curve here. So focus your research efforts there. Setting up windows is a pretty basic task for anyone that reformats their home machines regularly. There are some differences in the network configs and stuff but that all can be tweaked post-install. Since the OS will live on the RAID array, you cannot do much to alter that array once the OS is installed (as far as I know). So you’re gonna want to make sure that’s all setup and ready to go before laying down the OS. Then once the OS is up and functional, then you can go ahead and install more drives and another array for storage and format/configure the file share for that.
So you need a driver for the RAID array for windows to see it…
However you first need to configure the RAID array similar to how you configure bios you need to interrupt the boot process and get in the configuration screen.
If you can swing it just buy 4 drives and do RAID 5 + Spare
You need to Install HDs -> Configure RAID -> Get Proper Drivers for RAID card -> Install Windows
Hmm ok. The server instructions give two options to installing windows: raid and normal. For raid it tells you to install the “Intel AA RAID WIndows XP/2003/2008/Vista Driver for ICH10R” FLOPPY disk. Well that disk was not included, but it still gives the option for not using raid. I’ve looked through bios and it didn’t appear to be default RAID, perhaps I am looking in the wrong place? I’m going to try to get contact info for the company we got these from and see if I can get that disk.
Also, it accepts RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. And none of the specifications list the SCSI card. I’ll have to open it up later and see if I can find one.
But for now I need to go study for my heat transfer final.
