"Magikarp is a fish Pokémon with large, heavy reddish-orange scales" - [[https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Magikarp_(Pok%C3%A9mon)]] UCC has a theme for naming servers in the machine room after sea creatures starting with M. I decided to have a bit of fun with this and name the two HP servers after Pokemon that are also sea creatures starting with M.
How/where the machine was obtained
Magikarp was donated by Dylan Hicks [333] along with Mudkip to UCC on 8/07/2019, and a rail kit was later purchased and donated on 5/08/2019.
History prior to arriving to UCC
This machine was previously used as a VM host at a remote minesite at a gold mining company, and was running VMWare ESXi from an SD card, with a separate SAN used for VM storage. As such, there is still some red dust inside, so it probably needs a good clean with some compressed air.
UCC machine history
- 08/07/2019: Donated and installed in the machine room using spare shelf rails and bolts from "Screw DB"
- 27/07/2019: A pair of spare 300GB 15kRPM IBM disks from the machine room were added and configured with RAID 1 (via Linux MD, not the licencing-laden HP RAID controller)
- 05/08/2019: Re-racked with a proper rail kit
??/??/2019: RAM between Magikarp and Mudkip redistributed so they both have 128GiB each
- 25/11/2019: Magikarp finally added to our Proxmox cluster, albeit with SSH key issues, which was preventing VM migrations among other things
- 23/01/2020: SSH keys finally fixed, making Magikarp now useful on the cluster
03/02/2020: James [MPT] installed 10Gbps fibre between Magikarp and Walnut (Ubiquiti switch), so it can talk faster to the other VM hosts
- 08/02/2020: Removed the 280GB Intel Optane from the unused Cisco UCS server in the machine room, added it to Magikarp, and configured it as a writeback cache for the RAID 1 array. Yay ~1GB/s writes!
17/04/2020: James [MPT] replaced the faulty fans in Magikarp and Mudkip with new ones
- 18/04/2020: Live-migrated the minecraft2019 VM (with local storage) to Magikarp with no downtime, so it could get some sweet sweet disk IO!
21/04/2020: Successful mass exodus of most of Maltair's VMs across to Magikarp via live-migration (that 10Gbps link paid off), because Dylan [333] broke Maltair (temporarily). Magikarp has proven itself!
Current machine tasks
- Hosts VMs on our VM cluster ("atlantic")
- Particularly useful for hosting VMs that need a lot of disk IO but not a crazy amount of space
Current software configuration
- Running Proxmox Virtualisation Environment 6.4 (as of 06/03/2024), which under the hood consists of Debian, KVM, Qemu, LXC and a bunch of other FOSS projects
Current hardware configuration
- HP Proliant DL360p Gen8 1RU server
- Dual CPU sockets, each with a 8C/16T 2.9GHz Intel Xeon E5-2690 (gen 1)
- 128GiB of DDR3 ECC RDIMMs for RAM (8GiB per stick)
- Quad-port Intel 82580 Gigabit Ethernet
Dual port Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM57810 10Gigabit Ethernet
Dual port FibreChannel
- 32GB SD card for Proxmox itself to boot/run off
- Two 300GB 15kRPM IBM ST9300653SS SAS disks in a RAID 1 array using Linux MD for RAID
- 280GB Intel Optane SSD as a writeback cache for the RAID array, using LVM and dm_cache
Remote management via HP iLO 4 (with HTML5 KVM console). See sftp://ssh.ucc.asn.au/home/wheel/docs/RemoteManagement.org for details
Future plans for the machine
- To hopefully not have any more fans fail!
- To keep hosting VMs, with a focus on Minecraft VMs that like disk IO for world generation, and general VM hosting
Thanks to:
- Dylan Hicks [333] for donating Magikarp and the rails, and purchasing replacement fans (which UCC reimbursed) ...it feels weird writing a wiki page thanking myself!
James Arcus [MPT] for getting the 10Gbps fibre installed, playing musical fans between Magikarp and Mudkip to keep Magikarp going at Mudkip's expense (several times over the course of several months), and for installing the new fans when they arrived whilst Cameron Hall was in COVID-19 lockdown!
The rest of Wheel for letting me use the Optane in Magikarp <3
Mudkip for being a temporary source of spare fans, whilst it wasn't really being used
