equipment

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To support the UABgrid2 pilot we purchased a few Dell systems that arrived in April: two [Dell 2950s| http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pedge_2950?c=us&cs=RC956904&l=en&s=hied] with dual 3.0Ghz Xeon, 8Gb RAM, and 300Gb SAS disks (Perc5/i-based mirrors), a [Dell 1950|http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pedge_1950?c=us&cs=RC956904&l=en&s=hied] with dual CPUs and some local storage, and an [Dell/EMC 6TB SAN|http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pvaul_ax150?c=us&cs=RC956904&l=en&s=hied] to connect to the 1950. The 2950's will host various aspects of the UABgrid2 infrastructure including the identity management (VO, CA, and MyProxy) and application support (GridWay, Gridsphere, and other collaborative apps) systems. The 2950s will be hosting VMware-based virtual machines to carry out most of these tasks, with the goal of easing application deployment when conflicting system requirements arise. The 1950 will act as a quasi-NAS device, supporting traditional network shares locally and high-bandwidth file transfers via GridFTP (and potentially other protocols) for UABgrid job management. Together these systems will form the UABgrid infrastructure cluster.

since the mazurka disk wasn't coming back online, still flashing orange
decided to go to bios raid config. found a rebuild disk option and am
trying that to see if it gets included. none of the status indicators
suggest any problem except with the disk. ie. no controller problems

hfgh

We finished the loading of the racks on Friday. All the systems in the old rack are operational. The new rack still needs to be wired for power and network. The systems will then need to be powered on.

There were several challenges during the install of the systems.

* The suns were just beasts to get into place. It's worth noting that there face plates have some missing/broken screws so care should be taken if you need to open the front of the units. Grab the left face-plate holding on to the plastic "handle" from underneath. This is the left of center. Pull straight out and the units will open. If you have questions....ask.

One of the sunfire 280's is in place. Stubborn little thing didn't want to slide nicely along its rails. It's heavier than a beast and won't need securing in the rack since it won't slide without an army pushing it. Don't know how many tons they weigh but it's a lot for 4Us of space. They'll need to do more that just suck power and make noise for all that effort.

It took some time to get all the tools we needed for the rack install. We finished unloading the old rack some more, all the disk units have been removed...no jukebox. :( After figuring out a jack system for lifting the front of the rack enough to install the front stabalizer pad and then installing the foot rests, we realized we could have installed the foot rests first and avoided the jack problem. Anyway the old rack now has it's official front stabalizer pad in place and is resting on it's feet instead of its wheels. The feet help take the strain off the front stabalizer, too, where it doesn't really belong.

We started work on building up the new rack. First we need to get the rack joined to the old one. The annoying part is getting the feet on the old rack. We need to unload it, at least partially, to get the feet in place. The extra work will be worth it to finally have the lab fully unpacked from the move and in fully operational order. Then the fun stuff can start...