[geeks] anyone familiar with Dell's old blade servers ?

[Mark G Thomas]

Hi,

On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 12:21:05PM -0400, Nick B wrote:
> The most frequent issue is the KVM just goes away, and the blade must be
> physically reseated to get it back.  We've also had several of the KVMs die
> entirely.
> Nick
> 
> On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 12:17 PM, Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick at zill.net>wrote:
> 
> > On 5/3/2012 11:34 AM, Nick B wrote:
> > > I've had pretty bad with the 1955 blade chassis.  The servers themselves
> > > seemed ok.
> > > Nick
> >
> > What are the typical things that went wonky on them?
> >
> > Obviously this thing is going into a colo place, I don't want to be
> > driving out at 3AM if the Dell-proprietary frobnulator goes bad on it.
> >
> > --Patrick

I have not had any problems with my 1855 chassis and mixture of 
1855/1955 blades since I set it up three years ago.

Originally I had the chassis misconfigured, such that when one of the 
four power supplies failed, it shut itself down instead of continuing to 
run on the other good supplies. That was my fault with incorrect settings,
and a single power supply failure in three years seems reasonable to me.

I've never had any problems with the KVM, nor had to physically do
anything like re-seat a blade. The switch modules and DRAC cards have
ssh/telnet access, so the couple times I had to power cycle a
hung blade due to a sofware problem, I was able to do so remotely
and easily.

Mark


-- 
Mark G. Thomas (Mark at Misty.com)
Web: http://mgtinternet.com/
Tel: +1-215-512-0112 US: 877-512-0112