Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog

Disclaimer: I currently work for an IBM Business Partner.

I’ve written about the IBM x3650 before, and i’m generally very fond of this machine as it’s build quality and features are impressive.

However i’ve heard from several customers that they want the similar Model from HP, the DL380 G5, with the only reasoning being that the machine is going to be less expensive.

I’ve configured two almost-identical servers, and the price difference is clearly there. Please note that the configuration of the two machines is not the same, mostly due to real world restrictions in the Small Business segment when ordering machines. These restrictions are here in Switzerland - they might not exist in your country, and they might have changed in a few months. So take this with a grain of salt.

The configuration for these machines are thought to serve a Small Business with Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2.

Configurations

IBM System x3650

Configuration:

• Intel Xeon DualCore - 2.00 GHz
• 4 GB Memory (2×1 GB, 4×512MB)
• 4 x 147 GB SAS 2.5″ 10kRPM HP Disks
• RAID-Controller ServeRAID 8k 256MB BBWC
• DVD-ROM 24x/8x built-in
• PCI-X Raiser Card
• PCI-X SCSI U320 Adapter for tape drives
• Builtin Ethernet-Adapter Gigabit; 2x RJ-45 Copper
• Remote Supervisor Adapter II
• Redundant PSU
• 36 Months Warranty on-site NBD

Total list price: 9500 CHF
Warranty Upgrade to 7×24: 1000 CHF

Total: 10500 CHF

HP DL380 G5

Configuration:

• Intel Xeon DualCore - 2.66 GHz
• 4 GB Memory (2×2 GB)
• 4 x 147 GB SAS 2.5″ 10kRPM HP Disks
• RAID-Controller P400 256MB BBWC
• DVD-ROM 24x/8x built-in
• PCI-E SCSI U320 Adapter
• Builtin Ethernet-Adapter Gigabit; 2x RJ-45 Copper
• iLO Advanced License
• Redundant PSU
• 36 Months Warranty on-site NBD

Total list price: 7000 CHF
Warranty Upgrade to 7×24: 1450 CHF

Total: 8450 CHF

Conclusions

Okay, so we have a pretty major price difference between those two machines. The HP machine costs 20% less than the IBM machine. These prices don’t apply when you buy them by the truckload, but they do when you buy one or two.

Objective differences

About the IBM System x3650:

• 12 instead of 8 memory slots available
• No PCI-E slots needed to drive integrated disks (ServeRAID has a seperate slot)
• RSA II offers integrated email functionality (great advantage when not using IBM Director)
• Space for integrated tape drive (I’ve never used those, though)
• PCI-X raiser needed for U320 attachment
• Way better fan redundancy (N+N instead of N+1)

About the HP DL380 G5:

• 20% less expensive than IBM
• Greater choice on disk adapters
• iLO is standard, though KVM/Media functionality must be licensed
• More flexible memory ordering options
• U320 adapters with PCI-E is available - no PCI-X raiser card needed
• One slot always occupied by disk adapter (However, the machine has 5 PCI-E slots, the IBM has only 4)
• Less memory slots available

Unobjective differences

About the IBM System x3650:

• It’s black. Black is cool.
• The LightPath diagnostics seem much more mature than HPs new diagnostic system
• The RSA II offers an older GUI, but more features than the iLO Advanced License at a lower price point
• Rack mount kit looks more sturdy and generally better than the HP one

About the HP DL380 G5:

• Legacy PS/2 ports still available
• The front looks way better, but it’s not black

Final conclusions

Make up your own. I’ve tried to be as truthful as possible, and both machines have advantages and disadvantages. Usually the choice is already made if a customer already works with a given brand. Both vendors have pushed for different feature sets and their machines, and this shows quite clearly. The IBM machine is more expensive, and the additional capacity might not have much worth in your company. It really depends on your needs and your budget. Both machines are cool, though.

The DL320 is HP’s low end rackserver, similar to IBM’s System x3250, which i reviewed earlier.

This machine was purchased for use in a colocation center as a general web and mailserver for non-profit purposes, using Debian GNU/Linux 4.0. As such, there were serious budget constraints involved, which is why the machine chosen is on the lowest end of available (rack) hardware - as such, the machine doesn’t have a diagnostic panel (like HP’s DL360 G5 do, or IBM’s x3550 or x3650).

The machine was ordered using the new ALSO IVIS HP TopConfig configurator, and as such was shipped assembled (the delivery time was 9 days). Most in-stock articles have builtin CD or Diskette drives, which are a factor in price. With configured machines, you can save a few bucks with these things, and also get a better memory configuration (this is very important in low end machines, because they usually only have 4 memory slots (compared to 8 or 12 that better machines have)).

Here’s the configuration:

• HP DL320 G5 with 2.13 Ghz Xeon DC CPU
• 2×1 GB Memory
• 2×160GB 7.2kRPM SATA Disks

Unpacking and opening

This machine ships with the usual features known from HP - iLO 2, but without any licenses for advanced use (you can use it with a serial console that can be accessed with a Java Client). Also the slide-out serial number tag (an awesome idea in my opinion).

The machine also shipped prebuilt (which is nice, as i’m probably the most lazy person on earth) - the hard disk in the machine look like they’re hot -pluggable, and they theoretically are - but the onboard SATA controller does not support hot plugging. If you want that, you’ll need to buy a RAID controller from HP. I like this setup a bit more than IBM’s Simple Swap harddisks, but there’s no real advantage in daily use.

The components where assembled nicely, and the build quality is generally good.

Interiors

The general interior of this machine is very much the same as the x3250 - with a rather interesting difference: the machine has built in USB port, with lot’s of free space around it. I really have no idea what you’d want to do with this (if it was a desktop machine, you could probably use it with Flash for Vista’s ReadyBoost technology).

The fans in the machine are not hot pluggable, but redundant. The cabling is en par with the x3250, but there’s a slight disadvantage in extensibility. While the x3250 has a separate slot for installing specific IBM RAID controllers, there’s no such thing in the HP machine - you’ll have to use one of the PCI-E 8x slots for installing one of the HP RAID controllers. I do not consider this to be a problem in daily use either, because there’s usually not much need for expansion adapters in 1U machines.

Booting the server

The onboard controller is a standard Intel AHCI SATA controller (You will need to enable RAID functionality in the BIOS, and leave the RAID BIOS unconfigured - this will expose both disks to Linux using the AHCI driver). As of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, this controller is now natively supported in the default configuration. There are many options in the BIOS to save a variety of contact information. Maybe useful in enterprise environments, didn’t play with them that much.

iLO configuration works fine as usual, but netbooting the machine was awkward - it refused to load our WDS bootloader several times, but succeeded finally (WDS then boots RIS, which then boots PXELinux - here’s how to do this). I have no idea if it is just an old switch acting up, or an actual problem.

Resumee

Is this machine better than the x3250? Make up your own opinion. The only real world advantage i’ve seen is that iLO 2 is included in the machine, and allows you to access a serial console for free. The iLO advanced option which allows KVM access (and a variety of enterprise integration features) is quite expensive at about 450 CHF. The x3250 does not ship with an RSA II, but the RSA II is only 250 CHF, a lot less than the KVM access license.

When you’re using Windows, you can use EMS to use the serial port, on Linux or other Unix based OSes you can usually redirect both the console and the kernel to a serial port (and of course you can redirect the BIOS).

I liked the disks, which seem to handle much more nicely than the Simple Swap SATA disks from IBM.

IBM’s ServeRAID Manager in the Version 8.0 does not handle IP changes of the host machine cleanly. In my case, it continued to send information messages to the ServeRAID Port (34571) on the old IP Address. See the screenshot to the right on where to change this.

On this topic, i’ve found a very interesting link, IBM’s ServeRAID Reference, with lot’s of pictures and detailed specifications of each controller.

Layer One sucks. Big time.

They’ve had power outages before, and again. However, it seems that they didn’t change anything. This is the fifth power outage, and we’re there for at most 1.5 years.

Today, there was a smaller power taking down only of the two power lines we had. But it still lasted for several hours, and recovery and information was incompetent and slow. Don’t go to Layer One. Their Power Grid sucks as much as their service and their information policy.

Windows Vista is out - since half a year. But the hardware manufacturers are still catching up. While printing on Vista with HP devices works flawlessly now, the MFP front is not that green.

The drivers that are out for the semi-professional MFP devices (like the MFP 3027x) and Windows Vista are for printing only - they don’t contain faxing or scanning software. While the latter isn’t that much of a problem because you can use digital sending from the device (to email, or to folder for the more expensive devices), faxing is an issue. Of course you can print the fax, and then scan it. But that’s pretty ugly (and not to mention expensive in terms of employee time, toner, paper).

Luckily, the HP Fax drivers for Windows XP work without problems on Windows Vista (of course only on 32bit Versions). I wasn’t brave enough to install the HP toolsuite for Windows XP in order to try scanning (too much garbage included).

I think it’s a shame that most manufacturers didn’t have drivers out on 31.01.2007 - the official consumer launch date for Windows Vista.

We recently had to connect a distributed, legacy system using RS232 to a modern network. One of the main ideas behind it was to centralize it - but this can be rather difficult when talking about RS232 in a variety of locations. We looked around, and found a company that made what we were looking for.

Moxa sells many embedded adapters, we bought the cheapest one, the NPort 5110. In Switzerland, these can be bought from Disdata, and cost about 160 CHF.

The good thing about those devices is that they support real COM operations mode on Windows Server 2003, Vista in both x32 and x64 editions. Many other companies do not yet offer x64 drivers or Vista support.

Without reading any manuals, these thingies were up and running in 10 minutes - this is quite good. A few years ago i’ve worked on a similar problem, and i don’t even remember what product we used - i just know that it wasn’t as easy as it was today.

The System i has a lot of SRC codes. However, IBM does not document all of them extensively enough to perform diagnostics on your own. Here’s what i’ve gathered in reality.

C600 4031

IBM’s Description:

Destroy IPL task, DST has been started

How i’ve seen it:

If you see this code for more than a minute, the system is not able to find a console device. If you see this without doing any hardware modification, something has gone seriously wrong. If you shuffled around some cards previously, reverse that.

2844 B935

IBM’s Description:

Unknown hardware detected

How i’ve seen it:

Either you have really installed unknown hardware, or you’ve forgotten to apply the necessary PTFs. The other problem could be that you installed an IOPless only IOA behind an IOP, which will lead you to this SRC code

B200 3141

IBM’s Description:

System log entry only, no service action required
The IOP in the slot used for the last successful IPL of the operating system was replaced with an I/O Adapter. The IPL will continue by searching for a valid load source device.
Check the LPAR configuration if required, and ensure that the tagged I/O for the partition is correct.

How i’ve seen it:

This happens when you replace an IOP with an IOA, and some card (most likely the embedded disk controller) is no longer under IOP control, but that is needed for the system to successfully IPL. Even though IBM’s description doesn’t see this as a serious problem, the system will stay at this error message indefinitely until you place the IOP back to it’s old place.

My first post at another blog.

Read my System i 515 Hardware Review.

Zebra manufactures label printers. While they do have their own print servers, i’ve seen many deployments where non-Zebra print servers where used. These printers are usually attached to a System i by using a remote outq and a print server.

The difficulty now comes when you have to update their firmware - of course you could just go and plug it into a PC with an old IEEE1284 port, but that might not be very convenient because laptops no longer have them, USB attachment has it’s own set of associated problems, and one might not want to walk to every printer just to upgrade the firmware.

Zebra’s printservers have integrated abilities to upgrade the firmware, and they even have tools to do this job for you. But in this special case, i had to look for my own solution.

As the instructions for a local update, which consisted of sending the file to LPT1:, seemed pretty straightforward, i got my hand on some Unix-tools.

Netcat is available for Windows. You can use it to upgrade the firmware remotely by using a simply trick. Copy nc.exe to C:\windows\system32, extract the firmware to a directory, and then just run the following commandline:

nc 192.168.1.50 9100 < firmware.ext

Note that nc doesn’t exist even after the firmware was flashed successfully, you’ll have to exit it by using CTRL-C.

So you’ve bought a new rack server, like the IBM System x3250. But your Boss or your customer was to cheap to buy an RSA II card. And now you need to install Windows Server 2003.

This is usually the part where the fun begins. Newer servers do not have a floppy drive, but the only way to load drivers into Windows Server 2003, besides RIS or remastering CDs are floppy drives.

Getting an USB floppy drive is no big deal, you connect it to the machine, it boots, you press F6, select the storage adapter driver, format your hard disks, and then setup asks for the floppy again and again. Bummer.

The problem is that the first part of setup (loading the Mass Storage driver) is not handled by Windows, but instead by the BIOS’s floppy emulation. But the latter part, after formatting the hard drive is handled by Windows. And some of them are not recognized by the builtin USB storage drivers.

In my case, i had an iomega USB floppy with a built in card reader (don’t ask). I used device manager to find out the vendor and product id of this USB floppy.

I opened the txtsetup.oem supplied with my mass storage driver, and modified the section that my mass storage driver had.

I added the following line, directly to after the SCSI adapter itself:
id = "USB\VID_08BD&PID_1100", "usbstor"

I had no idea if this would work at all, but it did.

For your reference, i’ve included my txtsetup.oem, which works with iomega usb floppy dirves.