Migration Help?

Kuleinc

By Kuleinc
in General Support

Go to solution Solved by trurl,

Recommended Posts

Kuleinc Apprentice

Kuleinc

Posted
Posted (edited)

I have setup my own customer built server, which has been running fine. It is in a big Phanteks tower. It uses a Tyan S7045 Motherboard and has 16 cores and 32 threads of Xeon E5-2470 Dual CPUs. I have always had trouble with expanding the memory past 4 sticks of matched ram, no matter what I do I can only get 4 sticks to work or the system wont post. I have followed the motherboards manual with regards to ram selection and socket choices. So I only have 32 MB of system memory, which is a drag as I run VMs and Dockers on this machine as well.

 

Anyways, I recently had my eye on a local Supermicro 846TQ-R1200B Server Chasis, which I went and bought tonight. Unfortunately it has a X8DTN+ Motherboard with dual XEON E5645 CPUs. It has 96MBs of ram and has open RAM slots, and the RAM works. I had originally expected to just pull the motherboard and install my system in it, which has more cores but less ram, the architecture in my current server also seem to be more modern with slightly with better PCIE, better cores, etc.

 

Regardless of what system I go with I will be using the 846 server chassis as I have a large IBM rack to put it in, and networking upgrades are on the way.

 

The Super Micro server came with a LSi SAS9220-8i 6GB/s Card in one of its slots, and it has one SAS cable that is compatible with the card inside the chassis. The other two SAS cables are the wrong plug type. The SAS card has one open port. I only have 5 drives in my current tower machine, so that could work out nicely as they are on a SATA 3GB/s controller right now. Obviously this card could go in either machine.

 

I guess I'm just looking for guidance on how to proceed for the best system performance. I only get about 60-80 MB/s Second transfer speed over the LAN to the server right now, onto the SSD cache drive thats on a 6GB/s Sata port. The LAN will be 10GBe soon. I have already tested the speed from the two clients upstairs to the current server on the current lan and they are newer clients and capable of saturating the 1GBe I currently have, it would seem the servers storage cant keep up. I doubt it will be hugely better with the 6GBs SAS card, the Iron wolf drives are supposed to be 6GBs capable.

 

So first question is, I have a perfectly good running supermicro server, should I tear it apart and install my TYAN server into its case for the better newer architecture and cpus or just migrate to the hardware in the Supermicro server? I guess I'm leaning towards gutting the supermicro case and installing my current tower server hardware into it, which is why I bought it, its hard to chuck perfectly good hardware though. I'm just worried if I just migrate the array to the supermicro chassis with current supermicro hardware the performance will suffer. I run a Security camera recording software on it, plex, Nodes, home assistant, etc on the current machine on top of unraid.

 

HELP?

Edited by Kuleinc
Link to comment
Kuleinc Apprentice

Kuleinc

Posted
  • Author
Posted
8 hours ago, JorgeB said:

Start by running a single stream iperf test and post the diagnostics it it's OK.

I have already confirmed client and server can saturate the network connection, network performance isnt my issue here. I'm looking for suggestions on which hardware to use, best way to set it up and migrate the storage from old system to the new one.

Link to comment
Kuleinc Apprentice

Kuleinc

Posted
  • Author
Posted
7 hours ago, JorgeB said:

OK... but can you do that to test?

Getting 95-115 MB/s transfer rates. The unraid GUI says the network is running around 800-950mbs, which is just about all you can get out of gigbit connections.

 

I did some cpu mining benchmarks on the supermicro system and my current Tyan based tower system, and the Tower mops the floor up with the older supermicro architecture as far as raw processing speed, its over double. So I'm gonna pull both systems and see if the Tyan motherboard will fit in the supermicro chassis. Mostly concerned with motherboard mounting holes. I was able to flash the SAS card that came in the supermicro system to IT mode which is nice, its only got 2 sas connectors on it though, so I will have to get a second and third card to utilize all the bays in the supermicro backplane.

Link to comment
Kuleinc Apprentice

Kuleinc

Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)

I bit the bullet and migrated my tyan system into the super micro chassis. I have the system setup as before except the 3gbs sata ports are attached to the sas backplane and then the drive are attached to that. Seems to be working fine. I’m really pleased with how it all turned out. It’s fun to see blinking lights on the hot swap bays!
 

my new question is migrating the drives from the motherboards 3gbs sata ports to my lsi 6gbs sas card in IT mode. Can I just plug the sas breakout cable into the drives and unraid won’t notice? Or is there some migration procedure? I don’t want to lose the data on the drives. This is just for the unraid array, my cache SSD is on a 6gbs sata port on the motherboard (it only has two of these ports). 

Edited by Kuleinc
Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
Go to topic listing