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Workstations / Desktops / Servers

Discussion in 'Technical Board' started by Nettdata, Dec 1, 2009.

  1. Binary

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    We had a couple of those Lenovo units that were just fine. I mean, for that kind of workstation really that's the highest praise: they're not intended to be screaming fast, or super modular, or noticeable in any way. They were fast enough for two of our devs who wanted small workstations, and for two of our lab demo machines so that we could stash them out of the way. They didn't sound like wind tunnels, which is a problem with a lot of those SFF computers.

    Another option you could consider is Intel's NUC form factor. A few companies are producing them and you can also buy them as barebones kits.
     
  2. Jimmy James

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    I spent way too much time looking at one of these this morning. I streamed Dragon Age from my desktop to laptop at 1080p over wireless with Splashtop. Looks like this stick could run that with no issues, with a wireless controller and keyboard and mouse. NUCs look nice, but for me, the smaller the better.
     
  3. Nettdata

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    Any idea on price point or availability time frame? All I've seen is "coming 2015" everywhere.
     
  4. wexton

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    Pretty sure it is end of April. Think it was originally planned for March, but I am sure I have read a few places that said April.
     
  5. Nettdata

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    Be really interesting to see the price point... pretty hard to compete with a Pi.
     
  6. wexton

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    Think 150 for windows 8.1, 110 for Linux(think Ubuntu 14.04)
     
  7. Jimmy James

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    Yeah, they're $150 and expected to be released at the end of the month. I read that Windows 10 will be supported on a Pi, but unless it has a desktop side to it, it doesn't seem like it would be altogether useful for me.
     
  8. wexton

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  9. Jimmy James

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    As it turns out, I ended up getting a Pi2 Model B. I spent yesterday getting Retropie installed and went Ike and Tina on my wife in Super Mario Kart. The Windows store has an app for Splashtop, so when Windows 10 on my Pi2 becomes an option, I'm set. Still, having a full featured desktop would be kinda nice. I know that there's a version of Limelight that can run on Pi, but based on the youtubes I've seen, running it looks like a pain in the ass. I'm nothing, if not lazy. Give me something to double click and just work.
     
  10. Binary

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    http://gizmodo.com/you-can-download-a-free-windows-10-preview-for-raspberr-1701163750
     
  11. Jimmy James

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    Oh my lawd. Downloading now. I'll let y'all know how it looks when I'm able to get home.
     
  12. Binary

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    This will probably help nobody except maybe some random Googler some day, but I finally nailed down the problem so by God I'm going to write this shit down:

    One of my VMware clusters has 6 hosts in it. All of the hosts are connected to a dedicated HP ProCurve switch via 3 gigabit links, and the storage appliances are connected via 10 Gb links to the switch. They also have 3 gigabit links going into the production network (which is used for management).

    I have a few storage appliances attached, but the primary one is an HP P2000 G3 with 24x 900GB SAS drives.

    I've been having intermittent issues with hosts going offline. The VMs continue to function, but I can no longer manage the host in vCenter. Lately, I've also been seeing vMotions failing when I try to move multiple VMs at one time. Troubleshooting has shown that the ESXi hostd process is unresponsive, but I am not able to restart the process without powering off the host. Since I cannot move the VMs off the host at this point, it causes downtime.

    More investigation showed that the SAN switch had a fairly high number of dropped transmission packets. A short capture showed I was getting ~300 or so packets per minute that were dropped. The A1/A2 ports are two of the 10Gb uplinks. Notice they have no Tx drops.

    Code:
    Status and Counters - Port Counters
    
                                                                    Flow  Bcast
      Port  Total Bytes    Total Frames   Errors Rx    Drops Tx     Ctrl  Limit
      ----- -------------- -------------- ------------ ------------ ----- ------
      1     2,557,821,589  28,134,204     0            6456            off    0
      2     2,557,735,077  28,133,527     0            6642            off    0
      3     2,558,094,325  28,136,334     0            6731            off    0
      4     2,558,044,041  28,135,941     0            6906            off    0
      5     2,606,641,883  28,515,993     0            7480            off    0
      6     2,632,690,073  28,525,323     0            7647            off    0
    ...
      A1    2,879,206,544  24,187,648     0            0            off    0
      A2    2,737,240,236  35,707,108     0            0            off    0
    ...
    

    Whether you enable Flow Control or not on a SAN seems to be a pretty contentious topic. Some documents say enable it, some say disable it. In this case, it seemed clear to me that the packet flows coming from the 10 Gb links were overwhelming the 1Gb host links and causing overflowing queues.

    I first enabled flow control for just the host ports, but this did not address the problem. I couldn't find a document or configuration option for the HP P2000 on whether it supported flow control, but I enabled it anyway on the 10Gb ports and they negotiated successfully for flow control. Suddenly all of my vMotions work correctly and the switch has been up for roughly 2 hours this way, with between 1 and 10 total dropped packets per port.

    So to you, Random Googler who may stumble across this post, I hope it saves you the many hours of frustration that I have experienced.
     
  13. wexton

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    Now they have the super low powered Skylake chips in there compute sticks. At a very reasonable price point. Way more power then the atoms they were putting in there.

    http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-skylake-compute-stick,30020.html
     
  14. wexton

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  15. Nettdata

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  16. Binary

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    I've got a 24-slot 2U storage appliance in the budget for next year, but I haven't yet selected the drives I'm going to use with it yet.

    So... RAID6 w/ spare = 21 * 16TB = 336 TB for the paltry sum of $200k. I was planning on ~20 TB and around $50k. I wonder if I can get the R&D director drunk enough to approve that increase?
     
  17. Nettdata

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    Might need a steak and some strippers in there somewhere as well.
     
  18. wexton

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    Some blow as well.
     
  19. Blue Dog

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    Forgive me if this is dumb, but I'm pretty ignorant of hardware specifications and what-not. My workstation is around 5 years only (Dell Optiplex 380) with a standard 22inch Dell monitor connected via VGA. I have another older monitor with both VGA and DVI outlets that I would like to rig as a second display/dual-monitor type of thing. My problem is that I only have two VGA display outlets on the back of my tower- one male and one female:
    IMG_3281.JPG
    I'm currently on Windows 10. I'm guessing that this is my current graphics card (copied from the device manager):
    Intel(R) G41 Express Chipset Microsoft Corporation - WDDM 1.1

    My question is two-fold:
    1) Does this graphics card even support dual monitors?
    2) If so, would it be possible to connect one monitor via the standard VGA (as it is right now), and the other to the bottom/male outlet via DVI using an adaptor such as this?

    Thanks in advance for the help!
     
  20. Binary

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    @Blue Dog The "male" outlet is not VGA, it's a serial connection. You can't do anything with it. If your video card supported dual monitors, there would be another "female" outlet that you could plug into, and it would be blue like your current one.

    Your only option if you want dual monitors is to buy a video card that supports a second monitor.