Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] on replacing the savannah's hardware

[Sylvain Beucler]

On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 11:12:59AM -0400, Ward Vandewege wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> The current savannah hardware is a five or six year old HP DL380 G3. It was
> donated to the FSF at the time, and was a $20K machine.
> 
> I talked to Peter Brown, our executive director, about replacing it with
> something more modern, and he agreed. This means the FSF would buy new
> hardware (though donations earmarked for this purpose would be very welcome,
> of course). Beuc suggested we could also put out a call for the donation of a
> specific system, once we've made up our mind on what to get.
> 
> We've been buying Silicon Mechanics (http://siliconmechanics.com) systems
> lately, as they ship them to us with coreboot (http://coreboot.org)
> preinstalled. Specifically, they can do that for the A236 and A266, a 1U and
> 2U system respectively. Under the hood these machines have a Supermicro h8dmr
> (A236) and h8dme (A266) motherboard.
> 
> So, my question first of all is - do you want to stay with the model where
> savannah has an entire physical machine at its disposal, or not? 
> 
> If you do, you can use vserver and whatever you want to run. You'd have (way)
> more hardware resources than savannah uses at this point.
> 
> If not, it would mean moving Savannah to (a number of) Xen domUs. That's how
> we run the other FSF servers. Upside of this approach would be that it's much
> more portable across our machines, meaning that it would be a lot easier to
> move Savannah to another one of our servers in case of hardware problems.
> 
> I have a slight preference for #2 because it allows us more flexibility, but
> I really don't want to get in the way of how you want to run things, so #1
> would also be fine for us.
> 
> In terms of which actual hardware to get, I would probably go for an A266.
> The A266 is a 2U machine that can have up to 10 disks and 2 quad-core CPUs,
> and up to 64GB of ram. Some coreboot work would be required to get the
> quad-core CPUs working on this particular motherboard, however, so if we are
> in a hurry we should get dual-core CPUs - no coreboot modifications needed.
> 
> Anyway, we'd welcome your comments.

I don't mind switching to Xen especially if this means we can all work
better together, as long as we've got access to dom0.

I don't really have an opinion about dual/quad cores -- well, if the
coreboot changes introduces uncertainty when there's a failure, I'd
rather stick with dual cores and a safer mind.

-- 
Sylvain