Proliant G8 Servers

June 2017, acquired a pair of HP Proliant DL380e G8 LFF servers.

The plan for these is turn them into Ceph + hypervisor systems.

hardware overview

• 2U rackmount server
• 12x 3.5inch HDD slots in the front
• 2 sockets for Intel Xeon E5-24xx processors (original or v2)
• 6 DDR3 DIMM sockets per processor (12 total, so 96 Gbytes of RAM if fully populated with 8Gbyte DIMMs)
• 4x Intel chipset GigE ports on the back
• ILO 4 system management

cool things

• Can be found cheaper than Dell R510s now
• Faster CPUs than an R510 takes (one or 2 generations newer)
• 8 core, 16 thread, 1.8 GHz E5 CPUs can be had for under $35
• heat sinks included in the ~ $200 price

uncool things

• It's not UEFI based
• Not sure on-motherboard SATA adapter will drive all 12 disk slots in front
• Gen 8 3.5inch disk trays are hard to come by
• Only 12 DIMM slots -- these are not the thing for half Tbyte in memory databases
• E5-24xx CPUs are a little harder to find than E5-26xx

Goals for these

• After it's racked and cabled, touchless firmware updates
• Touchless OS install
  • There is no optical drive, so PXE booting and Fully Automated Install to be done.
  • To include cfengine or salt or chef or puppet or similar
• Encrypt all the bits
• Encrypt all the bits (on the disks)
• Encrypt all the bits (on the wires)
• One Ceph OSD per spindle

Parts!

• 3.5 inch HDD tray is HP(E) part number 651314-001 or 651320-001. Available from many eBay sellers for < $10, shipped
• 684900-001 is a kit for putting 2x 2.5inch (SFF) hot swap drives in the back of the chassis
• Power supplies are the HP "Common Slot" models used in G7 and G8 Proliant servers
• 684896-001 is a PCIe riser board with an LSI SAS controller and two (SFF 8087, I think) connectors located toward the front of the chassis