Many things happened in the past 12 days:
https://linustechtips.com/main/profile/511347-tophatproductions115/?status=276274&type=status
https://linustechtips.com/main/profile/511347-tophatproductions115/?status=277066&type=status
https://linustechtips.com/main/profile/511347-tophatproductions115/?status=277305&type=status
In addition to events on software side of things. I’ll have to do a livestream sometime either today or tomorrow…
The K80’s are coming…
I’ve got a GRID K520 coming in the mail in about 2 weeks, to replace the Tesla K10. Perhaps I can have one of my Tesla K10’s modded into a GRID K2 (or even just buy one) in the near future, so that I can have all three of the major variants for this card. GRID K520 looks like a GeForce card from inside a VM, if my memory isn’t failing me. GRID K2 would be the Quadro variant. Tesla K10 is a pure compute version. I wonder if anything like that exists for Tesla K80…
they have made versions of tesla’s with blower coolers but Idk if they had Video output
the fact they don’t have video output causes trouble with a virtualized K40 because the driver won’t activate without an NVIDIA output connected to a display
might be able to bypass this by having a quadro of the same generation in the same VM with output connected
Should I buy a cheap Quadro K-Series video adapter for this, before the GRID K520 arrives? I can probably do that if needed.
Also, just solved another looming issue that was delaying the project:
Time for a long-overdue project update. Omitting a lot of steps/details here, for relative brevity. A friend of mine, from Discord (the same one who was kind enough to help me troubleshoot the many of the issues I encountered), had me run a Linux LiveCD on the server to troubleshoot the LSI HBA. For those of you who did not know, the LSI HBA wasn’t working as expected until a few hours ago (late last night). I tested it in my current workstation (Precision T7500 - Windows 10), the server (DL580 G7 – ESXi 6.5u3), and even on my laptop (EliteBook 8770w - Windows 10). When tested on the T7500, the HBA showed up – but none of the 4TB hard drives showed up. The same for the laptop and the server. After a bit of Googling (as the cool kids say), I decided that it may behoove me to try flashing it with the IT firmware, to see if that would fix it. I did so from my laptop, by making use of a powered PCIe dock (to prevent further downtime on the T7500 – running a Minecraft server). I did so, using a GUI application called MegaRAID Storage Manager. The HBA was on v17.X, and now it’s on v20.X. The drives also appeared in Windows Device Manager for once. However, they didn’t stay in Device Manager for long. They popped in and out, sporadically. I was instructed to reboot after the firmware update was applied. MegaRAID Storage Manager stopped being able to connect to the local server after the reboot it said to do, for the firmware update to take hold. That meant that, if the firmware I flashed was the wrong one, I’d have to resort to using sas2flash. After no luck checking on the HBA from my laptop, I decided to put it in the server, with the Linux LiveCD (as mentioned earlier). The Linux LiveCD was running an older build of Manjaro, and managed to see all of the drives in gparted. However, we were unable to get SMART data for most of the HDDs. If you look closely at the HDD models, you may or may not be able to tell why. However, while I was in the LiveCD, I decided to also try GPT scheming the Intel SSD as well, since messing with it in Windows simply did not work for some reason. A short while later, we tried the latest Manjaro LiveCD available (because Manjaro is my preferred distro with sysemd). That one didn’t see the drives at all, but did still see the HBA. At this point, I saw no other way to validate the HDDs further. I made the decision to test them in ESXi and try to pull SMART data from esxcli. The drives showed up in ESXi, and even allowed for us to pull SMART data – but it was limited, in a different format than most common drives on the market. I was able to add the Intel SSD to the Virtual Flash pool for once, though. As such, this is strictly a partial victory. We have the drives ready for use, presumably. But we don’t know how the drives are doing – which is very different from all of my previous experiences, where I could pull up SMART data immediately after installing the drives. The game is afoot.
On a side note, the results of last night’s livestreaming attempt are tempting me to make YouPHPTube part of the project again. If this keeps up, I might actually go for it…
New equipment purchases incoming, possibly:
https://linustechtips.com/main/profile/511347-tophatproductions115/?status=279647&type=status
ToDo List for the next few days:
Figure out Split Horizon DNS records (Technitium)
Setup ejabberd and hMailServer
Setup Artix Linux VM
Coming soon:
Just removed YaCy from the project, in favour of researching YaCy Grid. Here’s to hoping I can get it working in a shared environment…
I currently have a PCIe WiFi NIC coming in the mail. I also have a pair of Ethernet NICs sitting in inventory. The server already has a SolarFlare SFN5322F sitting in it. What if I threw FRRouting onto a Linux VM, and passed through the mentioned NICs to it? Sounds like a virtual managed switch in the making. I could have the Linux VM use the wireless NIC to connect to the house WiFi on one network (192.168.1.0), and have it sit at an arbitrary address (Perhaps 192.168.1.2). Then have the wired NICs be used for an internally-managed network (10.0.0.0). Setup the Linux VM as the default gateway (Maybe 10.12.7.1), have it handle DHCP and internal DNS. Last step would be to route all outbound traffic from clients on 10.0.0.0 through 10.12.7.1 => 192.168.1.2 . All outbound traffic from 10.0.0.0 clients will appear to come from 192.168.1.2, which sounds similar to NAT (many clients/private IPs behind one gateway/public IP). Setup forwarding rules and throw the Linux VM sitting at 192.168.1.2 into the DMZ (since port forwarding on the new ISP router is utter garbage for some reason). That would kill off the need for a router/extender in my room, assuming that the only untested component in this equation works - the WiFi adapter I got from overseas. Also still need to work on this. The rack-mounting kit for my server is ~200 USD by itself - yikes…
Questions that I asked recently in other places:
Either I have forgotten how to make edits, or I can no longer edit the OP. But, that’s not important.
I’ve changed the projected memory allocations for over half the VMs:
Just purchased an HPE 641255-001 (PCIe ioDuo MLC I/O Accelerator) for the server. Not sure if it will work in ESXi. I guess there’s only one way to find out!
On a lesser note, the VMware Communities mirror seems to be officially ded this time. Can’t edit the OP or add replies. Not sure if I want to go through the trouble of getting it revived myself. If anyone here wants it brought back, feel free to say so…
Okay, things got off to a rocky start with the new NICs:
The vCenter Server Appliance hasn’t been treating me too nice lately, either. It went from just taking 15-30 minutes to start up (consistently) to sometimes not starting at all - and needing a reboot. The HTML5 UI also is buggy in my case, and doesn’t accept my credentials half the time. So I’m stuck using the FLEX UI instead - which requires Flash Player (another EOL technology) and Internet Explorer (a deprecated browser) to make it work. I’m not getting the benefits that I should have gotten from it, for one reason or another, which is unfortunate. Also can’t seem to make it keep my Virtual Flash Resource Pool between server reboots, which is another small gripe. Can’t manage that if vCenter Server won’t start up. I might have reason to switch to the Windows-embedded version instead, sadly. That one may be more reliable in my case…
Just got the HP 10GbE NIC working! This means that I may be able to start my 10GbE transition in the next few months. Next will be my 4K60fps livestreaming transition getting the IO Accelerator working 
It’s been a slow weekend playing with the server. On Thursday, I couldn’t get anything done because of New Year’s (which I am fine with). On Friday, I slept in due to how late I stayed up, and then had surprise visitors XD
Didn’t get any work done that day, since I was busy keeping the visitor’s kids out of the room. On Saturday, I finally got to throw in the HP NC524SFP NIC (along with its memory module). Once they were attached to the SPI board, I fired up the server and checked to see if the 16TB drive cage and ~1TB Virtual Flash Resource Pool showed up in ESXi - that of which they did 
FYI, just about every time I add new hardware to the DL580 G7, I check for those two things - because they tend to act as immediate indicators for whether something is wrong, strangely enough. That’s when no other problem indicators are present (which there rarely ever are). vCentre has thrown an occasional warning, but nothing of consequence from what I’ve seen thus far.
After that, I spent most of last night changing my AD and DNS settings, to prepare for adding my first devices to AD. That went on until close to midnight, and is still not quite done yet. Today, I replaced the SolarFlare SFN5322F with an HPE 641255-001 (PCIe ioDuo MLC I/O Accelerator) - a gutsy move with how the server can be with adding new hardware. At first, only 2/4 SAS HDDs showed up in ESXi. After a reboot, and letting the server warm up for a bit, all storage devices and new components showed up. So far, so good!
However, due to how slow testing has been, I had to put off testing the Tesla K80’s and DERAPID PCE-AX200T wireless NIC. If I can get the DERAPID PCE-AX200T working, the Linux VM is definitely going to run an FRRouting instance. Still need to figure out the vCenter startup time issue. At least I can start the 10GbE transition soon…
Looks as though I can’t add the new parts to the OP on this platform. You’ll have to read the comments to see the changes 
Just attached the rail kit to the server, in preparation for the rack that’s coming in the mail this week. Can’t wait to take photos of the finished result…
