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SVCS

SVCS are servers that I use for hosting various network services.

The name "SVCS" is the hostname prefix for presence on the local network. For example, a hostname would be "CTCL-SVCS1". The SVCS name was used since late 2020 from when I first started to use rack mountable servers in a home environment.

SVCS1

Starting January 2025, the Supermicro X8DAi motherboard from a WBPC desktop was installed into a chassis and is now used as the main virtualization server. This is a temporary solution until I can save up for an AMD EPYC-based Supermicro board. I plan to put this board back in the same case to restore the original configuration of the desktop when the time comes.

Specs:

SVCS - 2023-2025

From May 2023 to January 2025, for virtualization servers, I used an HP BladeSystem C3000 chassis with up to three BL460c G8 servers. The server chassis and its blades were given to me by my friend's father who was clearing out an office.

In January 2025, I stopped using the HP BladeSystem C3000 chassis after the UPS system that was being used to power it became unreliable due to battery errors. I had to switch to using a single Supermicro-based server, described above, that shares the UPS system with the router and storage server. The three BL460c G8 servers were much too powerful for what I needed and most of the time, the fans on the chassis used more power than the servers themeselves.

In hindsight, it was a better idea to save my money and wait for the price of second-hand AMD EPYC-based boards such as the Supermicro H11SSL-i, H12DSi-NT6 or H12SSL-i to drop which it eventually did throughout 2023 and 2024. I do plan on doing this eventually, using the same Supermicro CSE-825 chassis that is currently being used. At the time, in early 2023, when I received the HP hardware, I just heard of blade servers for the first time and was fascinated by the density possible with them even in older units dating to 2010-2012 that have multiple terabytes of RAM per chassis.

SVCS1

This system is currently used for general purpose virtualization.

Specifications as of May 2, 2024

SVCS2

This system is used for ancillary virtualization for services I have developed myself. As of January 7, 2025, this system is currently not in use.

This is the oldest BL460c G8 in use, with motherboard components dating to mid-2012. From June 8, 2023 to October 9, 2023, the system reported a motherboard error that was later discovered to just be the BIOS version not supporting the Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge CPUs that I attempted to install on June 8, 2023. After the original E5-2650 Sandy Bridge CPUs were installed, the system operated as normal. This configuration may be used indefinitely due to the difficulty of updating the firmware of these systems.

Specifications as of January 7, 2025:

SVCS3

This system is used for workloads that rely on single-threaded performance. As of January 7, 2025, this system is not in current use.

This system was not put into production until March 2024, one of the reasons for this was that I could not have the system boot to a drive connected to the RAID controller. The fix was relatively simple; all I needed to do was change a setting within HP ORCA to have the system boot from a drive on the RAID controller.

On February 11, 2024, the E5-2643 v2 CPUs where switched for E5-2667 v2 CPUs due to the higher core count and slight increase in single-threaded performance.

On April 5, 2024, a Minecraft server was set up bare metal on this system for use by a college club. 16GB of memory is allocated to the JVM and the server has access to the 16 cores/32 threads of the two E5-2667 v2.

As covered in the blog post for Week 12 of 2024, there has been attempts to run LLMs on this system but these were not successful due to the lack of AVX2 support of the Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs.

Specifications as of January 7, 2024:

CTCL 2011-2025