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

[JP Hindin]

My work had several hundred 1855s and 1955s running concurrently. We've
replaced them with M1000e chassis and M6xx and M7xx blades. I have a mixed
1855/1955 system that I use for development work, however, and have had
zero troubles with it... excepting the DRAC.

The Java application and/or the chassis side for the 1855 DRAC is an
absolutely horrid, horrid piece of work. Every time I use it I am left
cursing Dell's name. It doesn't work properly on any even vaguely current
(post 2000) browser, it locks up and dies consistently and I've never
managed to make the virtual media work, ever.
I usually do the heavy lifting in front of it with a plug-into-the-blade
KVM pigtail (which provides 2x USB and SVGA), but I have the convenience
that the blade chassis is 100' away in another office.

(I should note the later DRACs and iDRACs, particularly in the 6xx 7xx
chassis/blades, are truly a delight to work with. I guess it took them
several years to get it right)

 - JP

On Mon, 7 May 2012, Mark G Thomas wrote:
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> GEEKS:  http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/geeks