Dell PowerEdge

Quick Dell Cachecade performance comparison using RAID 5

May 18, 2014 by Paulie Leave a Comment

I recently purchased and configured a Dell R320 with 3 x 2.0Tb Western Digital SATA Hard drives and although I knew the Cachecade drive I had configured was working I did a quick performance comparison using HD Tune to confirm it and see the difference.

I don’t really think synthetic tests like this provide much value and it is easy to feel the difference in responsiveness when using the server in anger.

Just a quick bit of background on the server and specification:

Dell PowerEdge R320
Intel Xeon E5-1410 (2.80GHz, 10M Cache, 6.4GT/s QPI, Turbo, 4C, 80W)
8Gb Ram
3 x 2.0Tb Western RE Digital SATA hard drives (Configured as RAID 5)
PERC H710 512Mb NV Cache
Intel SSD DC S3500 Series 240Gb

The interesting thing which I did not realize until I started playing with this Dell Poweredge R320 is cachecade is now supported on the Dell H710 512Mb PERC controller and not just the 1Gb version. On the previous models (H700) the Cachecade options were only available on the 1Gb version which was a shame because it was one of the more expensive options when configuring a Dell PowerEdge.

In case you were wondering, the PERC H700 and H710 recognize and work perfectly well with the Intel DC S3500 Series Solid State Drives and they can be used either as cachecade volumes or regular volumes.

I didn’t purchase any of the drives or SSD from Dell when purchasing the server as they were too expensive and didn’t provide the options I wanted.

I know lots of websites provide extremely detailed performance analysis and I am not going to do that, I do not have the knowledge or the time to perform such exhaustive tests!

Dell Cachecade performance comparison

So, here are the figures obtained without Cachecade enabled:

and here with Cachecade enabled:

As you can see in the screenshot with Cachecade enabled that the performance is much more consistent with far fewer extreme spikes. Minimum speed is maintained at over 200MB/second which I think is pretty quick for a modest server. Although the Burst rate is lower which I don’t really understand.

I had stopped using RAID 5 in recent years due to the relativly poor performance, but I think that with the help of Dell Cachecade it could become more viable.

On the next server I will test RAID 10 without Cachecade vs RAID 5 with Cachecade on a simple 4 disk setup and see how they compare.

Tests were run on a cleanly installed Windows 2012 Standard Server.

Installing a 2.5″ SSD in a 3.5″ Dell Drive Caddy

May 15, 2014 by Paulie 3 Comments

I was playing around with a new Dell Poweredge R320 and I decided to see if it would be possible to attach at 2.5″ SSD drive using a 3.5″ drive carrier without having to purchase the 3.5″ to 2.5″ converter kit from Dell.

It is actually very easy and I can only assume the adapter kit provides some extra fastening points to make the SSD more secure. Given that an SSD has no vibration whatsoever I think the two screws used to hole the drive in should be fine, has been so far.

Here is the standard 3.5 SATA Drive tray with a 2Tb Western Digital RE in place:

After removing the Western Digital Drive I installed the Intel DC 3500 240Gb SSD into the drive caddy, as you can see the SATA data and power connections end up in exactly the same place as on a full size 3.5″ drive:

The SSD required smaller screws than the hard drive, but luckily I had some of those lying around anyway. Even though the SSD is only attached to the drive tray with the two screws visible in the photo, it was still secure and by the time it is pushed into the server SATA connector, it is not going to be going anywhere.

This SSD was connected to a R320 with a PERC H710 512Mb raid controller and worked beautifully.

Using an Non Dell SSD as a CacheCade on a Dell PowerEdge

February 15, 2012 by Paulie 11 Comments

I’ve been itching to try out the LSI CacheCade technology since reading this review:

http://www.storagereview.com/lsi_megaraid_cachecade_pro_20_review

The LSI CacheCade Technology is now included with Dell PowerEdge Servers that have the PERC H700 1GB Raid controller installed. What I have been unable to determine from the Dell documentation is if the Dell PERC Controllers support CacheCade V2.0 or the original specification.

It has been said that it is not possible to add drives that are not factory fitted by Dell to an existing server and I am happy to report that the Intel 520 seems to work without issue. Perhaps this is a change that Dell made to the controller firmware.

I really wanted a high performance SSD that carries a long warranty and Intel seem to be the only vendor that offer that at the moment.

Installing the SSD inside an R510 is really easy and it is quite a neat setup as you don’t lose any of your main storage bays as the server has two internal 2.5″ drive bays:

The Drive Itself:

The internal 2.5″ Drive Bays (Notice the included screws atop of the bays, a nice touch) :

Dell PowerEdge R510 2.5" Drive Bays to house an SSD for Cachecade usage — Dell PowerEdge R510 2.5″ Drive Bays

The internal 2.5″ Drive Bays with the Intel 520 120GB SSD installed:

Once the drive is installed, go into Raid Controllers BIOS configuration utility (CTRL+R) and you should see the newly added Intel drive listed:

Highlight your controller and press F2 and a list of available tasks is displayed. Choose “Create CacheCade Virtual Disk”:

Select the SSDs that you want to add to your Cachecade virtual disk. I’ve not tried it with more than one:

And hopefully you will get a successfully created message:

CacheCade can only be set-up on the DELL PERC H700 with 1GB memory. So don’t go splashing out on an SSD if you don’t have that RAID controller. I presume it will also work on a H800 with 1GB, but don’t have one in this machine to test it.

Have not had a chance to do any performance comparison as yet, and it is a shame that there are no tools to actually show you if the CacheCade is active or to provide any statistics.

Email alerts from Dell Open Manage Server Administrator (OMSA)

September 8, 2011 by Paulie 154 Comments

Dell OpenManage Server Administrator can execute an application when a fault is detected in the hardware, unfortunately there is no built in e-mail support, so this PowerShell can send the email for you without the need for any additional software.

The script will:

Send an email to a specified recipient.
Include information about the system from “omreport chasis info”.
Attach the System Alert Log to the email.

Example e-mail alert from Dell OpenManage

How to install the alert script:

Download the Dell Alert Script
Extract it to a folder on your system, e.g. “C:\Script”
Edit the variables at the top of the script to configure your email setup

Image showing variables within PowerShell script used to send email alerts from Dell OpenManage Server Administrator — If you do not specify an SMTP Server, it will default to using the local machine.

Test Email functionality

Now that you have the script and have configured your SMTP options do the following:

Open PowerShell.
Run the script with the “testemail” parameter e.g:
c:\script\OMSA_Alert.ps1 testemail
Check your email, if everything worked you should received a test alert.

Setup email alerts from Dell OpenManage

Once the email function has been tested you can go ahead and setup the script to run from Dell OpenManage:

Open PowerShell
Run the script with the “Setup” Parameter e.g:
c:\script\OMSA_Alert.ps1 setup
The script will generate batch files in the directory where you run the script. These batch files are what will be executed by OMSA.

Generate a test alert from your server

Here are some methods to test the script with a real alert:

Open the server case, this will generate a chassis intrusion alert.
If you have a dual power supply system, pull the power to one of the supplies and the server should report the power loss.
Trigger a temperature alert:
- In OMSA go to:
  System -> Main System Chassis -> Temperatures
- Set the Maximum Warning Threshold a couple of degrees lower than the current reading.

Image of Temperature Probe on a Dell Server within OpenManage 9.3

This is an update to a script I originally wrote in 2010 in VBScript. I then wrote a new version in Powershell. I’ve now updated it again to provide compatibility with Dell OpenManage 9.3. The omconfig command produced the error:

Error! No application exists in the specified path.

The original VBScript version is included in the download, and the updated PowerShell version.

Dell Openmanage Server Administrator Email Alerts for Linux

October 2, 2010 by Paulie 30 Comments

Earlier this year I posted a script which sends email alerts from Dell servers using the alerting system built into Dell Openmanage. However, that script will only work on Windows systems.

A visitor to the blog called Steve has kindly posted some code on that post which enables the same functionality in Linux and I think it is worthy of its own post.

Before attempting to use the script you will need to download this perl script called sendEmail and that you have unix2dos installed.

The script accepts two arguments, which are setup or show.

“setup” will set the alerts action to the value of $alert_script which should be the full path to the script itself.
“show” will print the current alert settings for the system to the screen.

The code of the script is as follows, or you can download from here:



#!/usr/bin/perl

########

#

# Alter these setting to suit your system

$alert_script='/opt/asx_scripts/send_alert.pl';

$argument = 0;

$argument = $ARGV[0];

$omreport = '/opt/dell/srvadmin/bin/omreport';

$omconfig = '/opt/dell/srvadmin/bin/omconfig';

$sendemail = '/opt/asx_scripts/sendEmail';

$toname = 'name';

$fromname = 'name';

$domain = 'domain.com';

$tmp_path = '/tmp';

$mail_gateway = 'ip or name of mailgate';

$unix2dos = '/usr/bin/unix2dos';

#

#

if(“$argument” eq “setup”){
set_available_alerts();
exit;
}
if(“$argument” eq “show”){
display_set_alerts();
exit;
}
if(“$argument” eq “help”){
print “If you need some help read the code\n”;
exit;
}
unless($argument){
$desc=`$omreport system alertlog 2>/dev/null | grep “Description” | head -1 | cut -f2-9 -d: | sed ‘s/ //’`;
chomp($desc);
$date=`$omreport system alertlog 2>/dev/null | grep “Date and Time” | head -1 | cut -f2-9 -d: | sed ‘s/ //g’ | sed ‘s/://g’`;
chomp($date);
$host=`$omreport system summary 2>/dev/null | grep “Host Name” | head -1 | cut -f2-9 -d: | sed ‘s/ //’`;
chomp($host);
$tag=`$omreport system summary 2>/dev/null | grep “Chassis Service Tag” | head -1 | cut -f2-9 -d: | sed ‘s/ //’`;
chomp($tag);
$attach=”$tmp_path/$date.log”;
`$omreport system alertlog > “$attach”`;
if( -f “$unix2dos”){
`$unix2dos “$attach” 2>/dev/null`;
}
$send=`$sendemail -f “$fromname\@$domain” -t “$toname\@$domain” -u “System Error: $host SvcTag: $tag Time: $date” -m “$host SvcTag: $tag Error: $desc Time: $date” -a “$attach” -s “$mail_gateway”`;
}else{
print “If you need some help read the code\n”;
exit;
}

sub set_available_alerts {
$alert_list = `$omconfig system alertaction 2>/dev/null | cut -f2 -d”<” | cut -f1 -d”>”`;
chomp($alert_list);
chomp($alert_list);
@split_alert_list = split(/\|/, $alert_list);
foreach my $alert (@split_alert_list){
$set_result = `$omconfig system alertaction event=$alert execappath=”$alert_script” 2>/dev/null | head -1`;
chomp($set_result);
if(“$set_result” eq “Alert action(s) configured successfully.”){
print “Set Action:\t$alert\n”;
}else{
print “ERROR Set didnt return expected value ($set_result)\n”;
}
}
}
sub display_set_alerts {
$currently_set = `$omreport system alertaction`;
print “$currently_set\n”;
}

exit;

A good way to test the script is to temporarily set the “Temperature Maximum” to something low like 12 to trigger an alert.

Unfortunately all of my Linux machines are virtual machines so I cannot test or modify this script, so if anyone wants to give me SSH access to a server running OMSA, be my guest. 🙂

Again, big thanks to Steve for posting this and I am sure it will be useful to lots of people. This has also inspired me to make some improvements to my original Windows version.