Thanks to the joint marketing efforts of HP and AMD we just unpacked and racked a new HP DL785 G5 in the data center. It is hard to miss at 7U’s but there is an awful lot of power packed into this machine. The standard configurations have 4 sockets populated but ours has 8 AMD Opteron 8354 quad-core processors running at 2.2 GHz. That’s right – 32 cores in 7U’s. You can read more about the Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ Processor here including a description of the new HyperTransport™ enhancements of the 8000 series that support 8 socket server designs.
Each processor module is equipped with 8 DIMM slots that slide into the front of the server for easy access and hot swapping. We will try this out with SQL Server 2008 under load. You can get a good look at the physical system design at the HP site on the DL785 Quickspecs page. Our machine has all 64 DIMM slots populated with 2GB PC2-5300 DDR SDRAM for a total of 128 GB.
If you looked at the physical diagram from the link above you’ll see two local storage media bays at the top right on the front panel view. Our system has two Smart Array P400i Controllers, one for each bay, each with the optional 512MB of battery backed write cache. Each bay can hold up to 8 SAS drives and we are fully populated with 16 - 72GB, 10K drives. That is a lot of local storage. The P400 controllers will do RAID stripping across the disks in one bay only so the largest disk group I can have is 8 spindles. I haven’t decided how take advantage of that much direct attached storage given the horsepower of the server so let me know if you have any creative ideas. One thought is to put one or more transaction logs on their own local RAID group. That would simplify SAN layout if I could get enough IOPS locally. SAN layout negotiations get complicated in a hurry if you request a separate transaction log disk group per database to preserve the sequential write efficiency of the log writes. Something else to ponder.
I am also tracking down some more information on the power supply redundancy for this server. We have 3 power supply bays populated each with a 1200W unit. There are three empty power supply bays and the online documentation says I need all 6 bays populated to achieve “full redundancy”. I need to understand what the power consumption vs redundancy trade-offs are with this machine.
The DL785 chassis includes 11 PCI slots. They were all open when we took the lid off but we now have 4 populated with Emulex LPe11000 4Gb/s HBA’s Mark, our lab manager, found a block diagram for the DL785 on the HP site and he decided what slots to use to spread out the I/O traffic to the all the processor nodes. More on this later when we start to do some bigger workload testing.
So, it is in the rack with Windows Enterprise Server 2008 installed. I started to run some SQLIOSim loads against the local disks and one SAN drive. This is about the third time I have tried to run SQLIOSim on Server 2008 without specifying “Run as administrator”. SQLIOSim does not prompt for elevation on its own and is not happy running with non-admin rights. Next time I won’t forget. There’s a lot more to do so I’m going back to the lab. We have the 785 hooked up the HP EVA 8000 with 144 spindles and I’m curious to see if we can flood the EVA with IOPS. Wish me luck.
Phil HummelTECHNOLOGY ARCHITECTMTC: Silicon Valley
(Originally posted on the SQL Server Data Platform @MTC Blog)