HP DL380 G7 workstation | THE BEAST

[T0242]

I work at a data centre, and I wanted something unique for my workstation.

During my internship I used my Lenovo Yoga 710 (I recently put liquid metal in that) to drive 2 1440P monitors, definitely not bad. But it left me wishing for more.

 

I then decided I wanted to build a server that could power not 1 but 2 workstations, taking some inspiration of linus' 7 games 1 CPU video.

Currently this is my workstation:

It's on sticky rubber feet, so it always stays nice and centred, it no longer slips around.

 

It's very close to maxed out.

 

The specs are:

2x Intel Xeon X5690 

12x 16GB 2r memory (that's the max for 16GB sticks @192GB)

512MB raid cache (on the integrated P410 controller), looking for a 1GB module

1x HP sas expander, allowing me to attach an external sas enclosure, as well as the extra backplane

16x 600GB Intel 320 series SSD

as for the GPUs, I still want to get something newer, but this is functional

1x Quadro K2000

1x Quadro FX1800

 

The power usage is pretty manageable too (considering this is powering 2 workstations, blue is average)

 

Since the server will turn up the fans when you put cards in the PCI-e slots I have had cut the PWM leads going to the fans. I have connected them to an Arduino.

For the people reading this in the future, who want to do the same:

- The green wire is the PWM cable.
- The fans are reverse PWM, meaning if you want to make the fans spin slower you want to use a higher duty cycle (higher number for the analogWrite function.).

 

The cable management has been improved since (and the picture still shows 4r memory, which is no longer in this machine)

 

As for the operating system:
I am running ESXi on this machine, which works very well. The GPUs (and USB controllers) are configured in pass-through to give them to the VMs.

On the VMs I am running Windows 10, which is very responsive on this system. ESXi shuts down the VMs when the host is powered down, which works well too.

Both VMs have 64GB of memory, all cores provisioned (they are overprovisioned, 1VM could theoretically eat up the entire host), 256GB disk space (this has everything to do with how this started)

 

The storage speed is good, but far from extreme (considering there is a 16 drive raid 10 array powering it all):

 

Temperatures were a bit of a problem, so recently I have had to turn up the fans quite a bit (to hopefully extend the lifetime of this machine by a lot). The machine has thermally shut down before.

When Temp 30 would go out of the allowed range (this sensor is located in the chipset, located under the heatsink behind the CPUs.)

It's still far from ideal but it's definitely works.

 

Why would anyone do this?

- It's cool.

- You can remotely turn off, on and debug the machine, through the iLO interface.

 

So if you were wondering, if it was possible to use a server as a workstation.

The answer is yes, even in an office, as long as you are willing to put some TLC in.

 

[Ashleyyyy]

nice system! 

 

good choice on cpu's. i've got X5650's, but still. these chips are excellent value for money now.