==>I'm curious to hear if anybody has tried out a
64-bit x86-64 install of
any standard distro, and what their experiences
were.<==
Dual opteron planar boards available
from Tyan, Iwill, MSI and Rioworks
are Extended ATX form factor (12"x13").
All of these boards require EPS12v
powersupply of min. 470w, preferred 550w.
They must have 24/8 power connectors
not the usual 20/4 power connectors.
In addition, thermal requirements
require proper ventillation to keep 'em
running for a longtime. All these
means you need to shop for the proper
system case and pretty good ceramic fans.
Now, the memory needs to be buffered, ecc
atleast ddr 2100. 'buffered, ecc' is a
requirement for Tyan board to boot everytime.
No cheap memories, choice is Micron, Samsung
and Kingston. You can get 12gb to 32gb
depending on the planar board. There are
several variations of planar boards.
Mostly, variations are in PCI-X bus 100 or 133, how
many, onboard Ultra Scsi or Sata etc. Most come
with USB (most support 1.1 not 2.0)
Most planar boards comes with gigabit
network interface(s), IDE & Floppy.
Now, that said here is a breakdown of
discounted web prices from reliable vendors.
Planar $430, CPU 240 ($175 ea), Cooler ($30 ea),
EPS12v power ($100), 1gb ecc. reg memory ($240 ea)
EATX case ($120). So, dual opteron BYOS cost well
over $1500.
Now, having tested Tyan, Iwill & MSI, our preference
for our own warped reasons is MSI or Iwill.
MSI was the reference board at AMD with long
visibility.
SCSI, SATA are pci board options. Qlogic 2200 FC HBA
works on all planar boards we tested. We prefer this
to
on-board for various reasons, a simple one
the onboard SATA doesn't support raid 5.
We have tested Fedora Core 2, Suse 9.1 Pro,
RedHat AS 3, and in the pipe SUSE SLES 9.
Fedora had no problem finding itself and
doing the right thing.
So are the Suse 9.1 and RedHat AS.
Where is the beef ? Almost, all versions
had problems greater than 6gig configuration.
It works most of the time on RedHat and Suse.
We suspect it is more of a hardware problem.
Our initial deployment of 20 something
systems will have only 4Gig. So, to keep our sanity
we are not banging our head against barriers!
These systems will replace ibm pseries 660, 640
smp systems and AIX5.1L. In phase 1 we are
deploying some of these boxes to support >800 users
in a HA SAMBA/SAN environment and the other Oracle
custom apps.
To be fair, IBM brought some Boca boys and Austin
aunts, with their iSeries boxes. We were blown away
by the Linux performance and price/performance value
of ibm's iseries boxes.
Now, we are scratching our head about phase 2.
The iseries boxes benefits greatly from
the new power chip and its large cache in steps and
custom memory & bus management architecture. To add
to the 'value' computation ibm's support of system
and in SAN environment.
Dual Opteron with SuSE/RH enterprise server software
is a good deal for startups, research institutes etc.,
In closing, it is not wise to compromise on
power-supply, cooler and memory. They are part of the
equation for reliablity.
Cheers,
Rudy
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