Recently acquired DL 580 G2 servers

[mrconnerton]

Hey guys,

I have recently been given a couple of DL 580 G2 servers from one of my clients that didn't need em anymore. Even for being old G2 servers, their potential for hardware is very nice and cheap to max everything out. So, I have a few questions:

• It seems that the bios is actually missing from the servers as it says its not found. How do I go about resolving this?

There are three things I would like to do with these servers and could use some general resources:

1. Install debian or ubuntu server to practice some more advanced server stuff. My issue here is that ubuntu isn't installing, erroring out. haven't tried debian yet. Any general tips or help. Do I need to use the smart cd for this? which version of the smart cd should I use?
2. I would like to play with xen virtualization. Does this hardware support xen? any resources on getting this setup?
3. I (please don't yell) like to attempt to get windows xp installed (as I reckon there is no chance for windows 7). The REASON I want to install windows xp is for utilizing the cpu/ram for video rendering.

I appriciate any direction anyone can give me. I am pretty excited to play with these and would like to have them end up doing something useful. Thanks!

[Suman_1978]

Hi Matthew,

Debian and Ubuntu may not work with this old hardware, the only tested Linux operating systems are Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 till 5 and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 7 till 10.

I doubt if Smart Start CD is of any help in installing Debian and Ubuntu.  But this server supports Smart Start CD till 8.25
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=316533&swItem=MTX-d7672226b6284520b9e292b9bd&prodNameId=3288116&swEnvOID=2065&swLang=8&taskId=135&mode=3

Xen virtualization, I guess this hardware does not support virtualization.

Windows XP should work on this server but you may come across issues with Device Drivers and Raid.

ProLiant OS Support Matrix @: http://www.hp.com/go/supportos
http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/HVM_Compatible_Processors

Good Luck!

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hey!

"It seems that the bios is actually missing from the servers as it says its not found. How do I go about resolving this?"

I presume this is the Fibre Channel card, if so, then it's not a problem. You can enter the FC util during POST and enable it if you want. I believe it's mostly used for boot from SAN.

OK so RHEL5 is supported. Maybe you could try Scientific Linux 5/6 or CentOS then? They're free and based on RHEL.

I tried to find it and looks like the CPUs for the DL580 G2 are from 2005.
I also doubt they do hw virtualization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_virtualization#Hardware-assisted_virtualization

Maybe there is a way to do virtualization without hardware assist.

As for video rendering, Xeon CPUs are not made for this. If you want to do video rendering you'll get _much_ better performance if you get a desktop with a gfx card.

[mrconnerton]

ok to summerize: 

• Debian/Ubuntu probabbly won't work but I could use Cent OS. I never really use CentOS or RHEL so I guess that is out
• Xen probably won't work cause the hardware is so old. Okie Dokie.
• Windows XP COULD work/install but I will probably run into driver issues.
• "missing" bios is probabbly the Fibre Channel card so no big deal
• Even if I DO get xp installed or even windows server 3k and the video software working,  Xeon CPU don't work well for rendering :-P

Well Poop. I wonder what to do with em now :-)

[Jimmy Vance]

Not really a reason some of the newer distros wouldn't install on that old system. What kind of errors are you seeing?

Does the system POST? What is actually displaying on the screen about missing BIOS?

Have you ran the array configuration utility and configured the drives?

[mrconnerton]

I will boot them up again later this week and post the output.

They do post, I have not run an array configuration. They came configured already.