A new addition to the FrankenStation family, the Dell PowerEdge T630 runs RHEL (and Windows 10 Pro for DCS World) just fine!
A little while ago, I decided to retire my main workstation (A Dell Precision T7910) and go for a real server with lots of spare bays.
I had mostly been using as the T7910 as a RHEL hypervisor and I kept a small dual-boot Windows 10 Pro partition on it for the sole purpose of playing DCS World.
After much shopping around, I found a used PowerEdge T630 with 18 3.5" HDD bays. The machine took a few days to get to my home and transferring the H/W between the two systems took about an hour.
This included:
- all of my RAM (8 * 32Gb DDR4 LRDIMMs)
- Two excellent E5-2682 V4 cpus I got from a nice Lady in Shanghai.
- An H730P (2Gb) with several 2Tb SSDs and one HDD.
- An EVGA GTX 1660 Ti (6Gb DDR6)
- A SuperMicro Dual NVME PCI-E card with an 970 EVO drive for KVM guest datastore.
- A Quad-1G i350-T4 NIC (internal NICs, external interface, heartbeats).
New H/W included a pair of brand new high-wattage heatsinks (up to 160W per cpu), a GPU power distribution board and a pair of GPU cables.
I powered up the T630 and went upstairs. When I returned, the system had booted from the boot drive, found all of its hardware and the machine had re-joined the cluster.
Even more surprising was the nice discovery that the Windows 10 Pro install (on a small partition of the boot SSD) was able to reconfigure itself and boot successfully after that. I started with Windows 10 1903 and it was able to update itself to Windows 10 1909 without any kind of trouble.
A few days into this, I can say that I'm very happy with the transfer: the T630 does -everything- that the T7910 did and is even more silent than its former sibling. The T630 has more drive days, more DIMM slots and more PCI-E slots, which allowed me to re-install the Dual QLogic 8gb FC HBA I had had in the T7910.
To celebrate, I decided to take the Viper out for a small flight.. DCS World @ 4k on a Dell PowerEdge T630 with a GTX 1660 Ti works so well it is almost unbelievable:
Dell System Update was even able to patch the system (it applied an iDRAC update just fine) but the system icon was all wrong (My T630 isn't exactly a laptop):
And of course, it runs RHEL7 and OWacomp when I'm not flying over Nevada:
I had mostly been using as the T7910 as a RHEL hypervisor and I kept a small dual-boot Windows 10 Pro partition on it for the sole purpose of playing DCS World.
After much shopping around, I found a used PowerEdge T630 with 18 3.5" HDD bays. The machine took a few days to get to my home and transferring the H/W between the two systems took about an hour.
This included:
- all of my RAM (8 * 32Gb DDR4 LRDIMMs)
- Two excellent E5-2682 V4 cpus I got from a nice Lady in Shanghai.
- An H730P (2Gb) with several 2Tb SSDs and one HDD.
- An EVGA GTX 1660 Ti (6Gb DDR6)
- A SuperMicro Dual NVME PCI-E card with an 970 EVO drive for KVM guest datastore.
- A Quad-1G i350-T4 NIC (internal NICs, external interface, heartbeats).
New H/W included a pair of brand new high-wattage heatsinks (up to 160W per cpu), a GPU power distribution board and a pair of GPU cables.
I powered up the T630 and went upstairs. When I returned, the system had booted from the boot drive, found all of its hardware and the machine had re-joined the cluster.
Even more surprising was the nice discovery that the Windows 10 Pro install (on a small partition of the boot SSD) was able to reconfigure itself and boot successfully after that. I started with Windows 10 1903 and it was able to update itself to Windows 10 1909 without any kind of trouble.
A few days into this, I can say that I'm very happy with the transfer: the T630 does -everything- that the T7910 did and is even more silent than its former sibling. The T630 has more drive days, more DIMM slots and more PCI-E slots, which allowed me to re-install the Dual QLogic 8gb FC HBA I had had in the T7910.
To celebrate, I decided to take the Viper out for a small flight.. DCS World @ 4k on a Dell PowerEdge T630 with a GTX 1660 Ti works so well it is almost unbelievable:
Dell System Update was even able to patch the system (it applied an iDRAC update just fine) but the system icon was all wrong (My T630 isn't exactly a laptop):
And of course, it runs RHEL7 and OWacomp when I'm not flying over Nevada:
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