PowerEdge Hardware General

[wgtr]

Hi all, 

I have an R310 with the Petium 6950 2.8Ghz cpu and 4GB RAM. Currently I am running Kubuntu 12.04.1 32bit OS. 

It seems to run fine, just kinda sluggish. Does anyone know if it would be better to put 64bit on there? Or, is there a better version of Linux for the R310 servers?

Any help would be appreciated.

[DELL-Jonathan S · Accepted solution]

On the R310 we officially support and have tested and validated RHEL 4, 5, and 6; SLES 11, and XenServer 5.6 and 6. Ubuntu and derivatives have not gone through the testing/validation process by Dell however many have gotten it to work with little to no trouble, though I haven't heard of anyone running Kubuntu specifically. If you're booted into KDE/using the server as an interactive graphical workstation then I can imagine the desktop may seem a bit sluggish due to the minimal graphics capability of the server model. Are there specific areas where it seems slow to you? 64-bit would let you access all the RAM (as opposed to sharing the address space with I/O ports) though I don't imagine there would be a big performance difference between 32- and 64-bit except perhaps in specific applications that take advantage of 64-bit architecture.

[wgtr]

Jonathan, thanks for the reply.

I looked into Red Hat and Suse, but they are not free. We are not doing anything major with this server. We are planning to use it as a repository for storing sermons so that they can be uploaded from the various congregations around the world and then downloaded by individuals. And, it will be hosting a Windows 7 virtualbox that is running a shoutcast radio station streaming to a hosted server. All is free, so can't justify paying $1K for an OS, if the free one works. 

Main lag was when running VB. The Virtual machine runs mostly smooth, but the host was kinda laggy, especailly when minimizing the Virtual Machine it would just seem to lock up for a few seconds, then minimize and run fine.

I did switch to the 64bit Kubuntu yesterday and all seems better. Just a serious learning curve when coming from Windows.

A bit off topic, but, do you know if an I5 Quad core processor would work in this machine? It has a Pentium G6950 in it right now. I am particularly looking at this processor here : http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-i5-750-Quad-Core-Processor-2-66GHz-LGA1156-8MB-cache-/140836025217?pt=...

[DELL-Jonathan S]

Hi wgtr,

Several Dell customers who want to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SuSE share your concerns about licensing cost and choose to use CentOS or Scientific Linux instead. These are "free" derivatives of RHEL and although they are also not "officially supported" they often can be made to work with our diagnostic and management tools with little modification. If things are still working well with 64-bit Kubuntu then there is probably not an incentive to switch.

The CPUs we have tested, validated, and officially support in the R310 are:

Celeron G1101

Pentium G6950

Core i3-530

Core i3-540

Core i3-550

Xeon L3406

Xeon L3426

Xeon X3430

Xeon X3440

Xeon X3450

Xeon X3460

Xeon X3470

Xeon X3480

To tell you the truth I'm not sure whether the i5-750 would work in there although the pins match (LGA1156 socket). It is not a configuration Dell has tested or offers for this model and our BIOS may not POST. With a critical component such as the CPU it would not be advisable to go the road less traveled, while some leeway with the OS may be possible as you are experiencing with Kubuntu. Let us know if you have any further questions or need more information. Thanks again!