Found a poweredge r710, need help.

[HeroRareheart]

A little while ago I found a Dell poweredge r710 literately on the side of the road and I was wondering what it was designed for, how it works, and what I could use it for. I did manage to, through randomly messing with the BIOS, get it to run Windows 10 and got it hosting a Minecraft server but both the Minecraft server and the r710 ran like crap so I suspect I have the r710 configured poorly.

[Radium_Angel]

6 minutes ago, herorareheart said:

A little while ago I found a Dell poweredge r710 literately on the side of the road and I was wondering what it was designed for, how it works, and what I could use it for. I did manage to, through randomly messing with the BIOS, get it to run Windows 10 and got it running a Minecraft server but it ran like crap so I suspect I have the server configured wrong or something.

They are servers, integrated gfx card, so video games will not run well.

You can put a gfx card in them, but you need some knowledge, it's not as simple as plug n play.

 

[HeroRareheart]

1 minute ago, Radium_Angel said:

They are servers, integrated gfx card, so video games will not run well.

You can put a gfx card in them, but you need some knowledge, it's not as simple as plug n play.

 

I'm not playing the game on it just running a server off of it, dose that still eat away at the GPU?

[Radium_Angel]

1 minute ago, herorareheart said:

I'm not playing the game on it just running a server off of it, dose that still eat away at the GPU?

I'd have to know the specs of the system before I could properly troubleshoot why it's running poorly.

[HeroRareheart]

5 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

I'd have to know the specs of the system before I could properly troubleshoot why it's running poorly.

It would also probably help if I worded my original post better to. What exactly do you need to know about it? the server is full of, what to me is, odd hardware and I have no idea what half of it is used for.

[Radium_Angel]

15 minutes ago, herorareheart said:

It would also probably help if I worded my original post better to. What exactly do you need to know about it? the server is full of, what to me is, odd hardware and I have no idea what half of it is used for.

Servers are full of specialized stuff, makes them difficult to use as a general purpose system.

Give me a screen shot (EDIT: Please) of the Device Manager under Windows 10, with all the little "+" expanded.

Then I can see what we are properly dealing with

[HeroRareheart]

31 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Servers are full of specialized stuff, makes them difficult to use as a general purpose system.

Give me a screen shot (EDIT: Please) of the Device Manager under Windows 10, with all the little "+" expanded.

Then I can see what we are properly dealing with

Can do, I'll also list off everything I actually know that name of.

72 GB RAM at 800 MHz across 18 sticks

2 2.8 GHz quad core Zeon X5560

(edit) It has 3 hard drives configured in some kind of RAID, I forgot which kind though.

 

I enabled the drop-downs for everything seemingly relevant, hope this is what you needed:

 

[Radium_Angel]

2 minutes ago, herorareheart said:

needed

It'll do.

 

You have plenty of RAM, of course it's ECC (possibly registered) so it'll be *slightly* slower than normal RAM, but not so's you'd notice.

CPUs seem fine

Now your CPUs are 10 years old

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/37109/intel-xeon-processor-x5560-8m-cache-2-80-ghz-6-40-gt-s-intel-qpi.html

 

But again, should be fine.

So, what are you have issues with?

[HeroRareheart]

38 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

It'll do.

 

You have plenty of RAM, of course it's ECC (possibly registered) so it'll be *slightly* slower than normal RAM, but not so's you'd notice.

CPUs seem fine

Now your CPUs are 10 years old

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/37109/intel-xeon-processor-x5560-8m-cache-2-80-ghz-6-40-gt-s-intel-qpi.html

 

But again, should be fine.

So, what are you have issues with?

Well originally after I got the drives setup in a RAID and installed Windows 10 it ran slow and just blue screened and froze all the time, but after messing around in one, of the somehow many, BIOS's I changed something about how the memory was configured and now it no longer crashes and blue screens its just oddly slow. Read wright speeds are oddly slow the Minecraft servers I run on it will spit out "can't keep up", an error meaning the server lagged behind and is skipping ticks to catch up, and opening/running programs, like Google Chrome, is slow. Maybe its just age of the hardware but I wouldn't be surprised if I've configured something poorly in the BIOS or Windows.

 

I think the RAID is RAID 3 or 5, could that be the issue?

[Electronics Wizardy]

11 minutes ago, herorareheart said:

Well originally after I got the drives setup in a RAID and installed Windows 10 it ran slow and just blue screened and froze all the time, but after messing around in one, of the somehow many, BIOS's I changed something about how the memory was configured and now it no longer crashes and blue screens its just oddly slow. Read wright speeds are oddly slow the Minecraft servers I run on it will spit out "can't keep up", an error meaning the server lagged behind and is skipping ticks to catch up, and opening/running programs, like Google Chrome, is slow. Maybe its just age of the hardware but I wouldn't be surprised if I've configured something poorly in the BIOS or Windows.

 

I think the RAID is RAID 3 or 5, could that be the issue?

There is something wrong with it then. IDK the exact issue, but I have manny servers with the same specs of worse and they run minecraft servers fine and work fine for normal usage.

 

What drives does it have? Try making a raid0 on the current drives. Id also try a os other than win10, give a hypervisor a shot like proxmox or esxi.

[HeroRareheart]

14 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

There is something wrong with it then. IDK the exact issue, but I have manny servers with the same specs of worse and they run minecraft servers fine and work fine for normal usage.

 

What drives does it have? Try making a raid0 on the current drives. Id also try a os other than win10, give a hypervisor a shot like proxmox or esxi.

Well I did find it on the side of the road in Cambridge, I wouldn't be surprised to find out it has a bad part or something. The HDD's are 3 147GB 10,000 RPM SAS drives from Dell dated June 26th 2019, 2 weeks away from turning 10 years old. As far as trying a different OS goes I wouldn't know where to start on that, I'd describe myself as slightly above average when it comes to computer literacy. I'll give another RAID configuration a shot and see if it helps anything before trying an OS other then Windows, would trying Mine OS be a good idea?

[Electronics Wizardy]

8 minutes ago, herorareheart said:

Well I did find it on the side of the road in Cambridge, I wouldn't be surprised to find out it has a bad part or something. The HDD's are 3 147GB 10,000 RPM SAS drives from Dell dated June 26th 2019, 2 weeks away from turning 10 years old. As far as trying a different OS goes I wouldn't know where to start on that, I'd describe myself as slightly above average when it comes to computer literacy. I'll give another RAID configuration a shot and see if it helps anything before trying an OS other then Windows, would trying Mine OS be a good idea?

Id put a hypervisor on it, then you can run vms on the hardware. Look at proxmox. Then run windows and mineos and other oses on proxmox.

[alpha754293]

You might want to try configuring and running your Minecraft server on Linux using these instructions:

 

https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Tutorials/Setting_up_a_server

 

Note: Your 10,000 rpm presumably SAS drives is going to be no match for a modern, even cheap SSD.

 

And also, if you only have onboard video (which is probably either like a 8 or 32 MB framebuffer), you'll probably want to stick with the text console in Linux so that your system will, overall, run faster.

[Jarsky]

Perhaps it was on the side of the road because the previous owner thought it was broken with the same issues you're experiencing? 

 

Some things i'd do

- Open the case and check the inside is clean, if not clean with some compressed air

- Pull the coolers and check that the CPU's arent marked as "ES" (Engineering Sample). If they are consider getting some X5650/X5670's to replace them with. 

- Run memtest86+ and check the memory integrity

- Run hddscan or similar to test the drives

- Check that the BIOS is up to date

 

And I second Electronics Wizardy, put a hypervisor on it like ESXi or Proxmox and then install your Windows VM or whatever other OS' you want to try on top of that. 

[Radium_Angel]

7 hours ago, herorareheart said:

Cambridge

Start with MemTest86+ on the RAM, ensure it's not all bad.

The check the drives for health.

Skip the VMs and other options, start with determining if the hardware is functional first.

[HeroRareheart]

3 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

Start with MemTest86+ on the RAM, ensure it's not all bad.

The check the drives for health.

Skip the VMs and other options, start with determining if the hardware is functional first.

5 hours ago, Jarsky said:

- Open the case and check the inside is clean, if not clean with some compressed air

- Pull the coolers and check that the CPU's arent marked as "ES" (Engineering Sample). If they are consider getting some X5650/X5670's to replace them with. 

- Run memtest86+ and check the memory integrity

- Run hddscan or similar to test the drives

- Check that the BIOS is up to date

It's, clean, CPU's are not engineering samples, I have run the servers built express diagnostics test and encountered a few errors but none relating the the HDD's or RAM, and the BIOS is a bit behind and needs to be updated. I'll try updating the BIOS in the morning and running the more in depth diagnostics to get more information on whats wrong.

 

11 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id put a hypervisor on it.

 

Whats the benefit to doing that?

[dalekphalm]

1 hour ago, herorareheart said:

It's, clean, CPU's are not engineering samples, I have run the servers built express diagnostics test and encountered a few errors but none relating the the HDD's or RAM, and the BIOS is a bit behind and needs to be updated. I'll try updating the BIOS in the morning and running the more in depth diagnostics to get more information on whats wrong.

Do you recall what the errors were?

1 hour ago, herorareheart said:

Whats the benefit to doing that?

A Hypervisor is an operating system designed to run “virtual machines” (VM) as its primary purpose. 

 

A VM is exactly what it sounds like. A computer that is entirely virtualized. 

 

So what would normally take two physical computers to run two copies of Windows - for example, would be done on the same physical machine. 

 

The primary benefit is to run multiple instances of (usually) server operating systems, which each VM doing a different task, or setup in a different way. 

 

I would start by doing the recommended tests (memtest, and a HDD long test, and maybe prime95 too). After that, reset the bios settings back to default and then try installing Linux. 

 

If you can get Linux working okay, then long term I would definitely install a Hypervisor, since dual CPU’s and 72GB of ram is entirely wasted on one operating system. 

[Radium_Angel]

10 hours ago, herorareheart said:

encountered a few errors

Not a good sign. Servers are built to a higher standard (usually) than PC systems. If there's an error, it's usually critical.

Test with 3rd party systems on the HDDs and RAM. Don't accept the built-in tests for those.

A screenshot (or 3) of the RAID config will also be useful.

[dalekphalm]

13 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

Not a good sign. Servers are built to a higher standard (usually) than PC systems. If there's an error, it's usually critical.

Sometimes - but often times, it'll give errors for otherwise stupid stuff that doesn't affect usability - such as one of the Redundant PSU's being unplugged, or the Chassis being open.

 

Any Dell server I've personally used hasn't cared about those particular errors, even though it still logged them.

13 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

Test with 3rd party systems on the HDDs and RAM. Don't accept the built-in tests for those.

A screenshot (or 3) of the RAID config will also be useful.

Agreed.

[HeroRareheart]

23 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

Do you recall what the errors were?

13 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

Not a good sign. If there's an error, it's usually critical.

A screenshot (or 3) of the RAID config will also be useful.

I tested with the more in depth diagnostics and these were the most concerning errors:

Looks to me like the drives are probably slightly messed up, I'm honestly not surprised.

 

There were also some errors about an IPMI that showed up but I have no idea what that is or what the errors mean:

 

I setup a RAID 0 because the last configuration was so slow and it seams a little faster now at loading things in Windows and there are fewer instances of lag but the drives don't appear to be doing to good in the first place, here is a bad phone photo of how its setup:

23 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

 

A Hypervisor is an operating system designed to run “virtual machines”

So what would normally take two physical computers to run two copies of Windows - for example, would be done on the same physical machine. 

The primary benefit is to run multiple instances of (usually) server operating systems, which each VM doing a different task, or setup in a different way.

That makes a lot of sense, I'll be doing things which can't use anywhere near all the ram or all 8 cores of the CPU's. Proxmox looks nice and has a decent amount of tutorials and seams pretty beginner friendly so I'll give that a shot.

[Seol Chaos]

1.use CentOS

2.replace the thermal compound

3.Clean the dust in the chassis

4.Replace the best cpu that can be supported

5.use SSD and replace all old hard drives

6.done

[Radium_Angel]

7 hours ago, herorareheart said:

IPMI

The firmware in both the system itself, and the RAID controller are borked. Update both, clear the event logs in the BIOS and re-run those tests.

And you still haven't told us what the problem with Minecraft is.

Don't run VMs on the system until we can determine where the problem is, it's likely hardware and a VM is going to mask the issue. Get to the root of the errors before playing around with a VM.

[HeroRareheart]

1 hour ago, Radium_Angel said:

The firmware in both the system itself, and the RAID controller are borked. Update both, clear the event logs in the BIOS and re-run those tests.

That's what I just did, should I do it again?

1 hour ago, Radium_Angel said:

And you still haven't told us what the problem with Minecraft is.

Yes I did:

On 6/11/2019 at 11:04 AM, herorareheart said:

the Minecraft servers I run on it will spit out "can't keep up", an error meaning the server lagged behind and is skipping ticks to catch up

I should add this error is to be expected to some degree when running a Minecraft server but it happens way more then it should be.

[HeroRareheart]

4 hours ago, Seol Chaos said:

1.use CentOS

2.replace the thermal compound

3.Clean the dust in the chassis

4.Replace the best cpu that can be supported

5.use SSD and replace all old hard drives

6.done

No, I'll be running MineOS VM's in Proxmox

Did that

Did that

No, nothings wrong with the ones in it and there more then good enough.

If nothings wrong with the RAID controller sure.

[HeroRareheart]

2 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

The firmware in both the system itself, and the RAID controller are borked. Update both

54 minutes ago, herorareheart said:

That's what I just did

Wait sorry that's wrong, it looks like I only updated the BIOS and firmware for the system and not the RAID controller, the RAID controller is on old firmware. I'm finding this a bit difficult, all this server stuff is pretty new to me. When I boot up the system at various times I'm given options to enter several different configuration utilities, the systems, the RAID controllers, the network controllers, the IDRAC6s, I'm going to go through and double check what version the firmware's and BIOS's are for all of them and install/reinstall the latest version of everything. I should probably clarify that to update the server firmware and BIOS I followed this YouTube tutorial to do it through Dell's FTP server but that doesn't work anymore. The tutorial had links in the description to an ISO I could download and burn to a DVD that would update it for me and I just used that, is there a better way I could be doing it? I just did it mainly because it was easy and I was unsure how to do myself.