Wednesday 25 May 2011

Intel S3420GPRX I/O Shield Arrived Today

We finally managed to order and receive some I/O Shields for the Intel Server Board S3420GPRX today:

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We can now move on to building our entry level virtualization servers that are based on this server board installed in an Intel Server Chassis SC5650 pedestal.

One thing to note when it comes to installing the Intel Server Board S3420GPRX into a pedestal chassis is that we lose the ability to use any external facing I/O modules such as the AXXSASIOMOD which would give us external Quad-port SAS connectors.

The one PCI-E slot on the server board will be used for a high performance RAID controller with battery or SSD Cache backup so that leaves iSCSI as the only real way of reaching a central storage unit for a Hyper-V cluster.

An alternative may be to use one of the add-in I/O Modules for entry level SAS RAID that connects directly to the server board and use that PCI-E slot for a SAS or RAID controller with an external Quad-port SAS connection. We lose storage path redundancy in this configuration though.

On another note, we are just getting ready to configure a couple of Intel Server Systems SR1695GPRX2AC 1U 1P servers with dual Quad-port external SAS ports connected to a Promise VTrak E610sD RAID Subsystem to see if we can stand up a full two node Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1 cluster in this configuration. More to come on this hopefully later!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

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