Dell PowerEdge

How to Replace an SD Card in a Dell PowerEdge Server

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We use the Dell Internal Dual SD module (IDSDM) for our VMware ESXi hosts. It works great, and saves us a bunch of money per server in that we don’t need RAID controllers, spinning disks, etc. Ours are populated with two 2 GB SD cards from the factory, and set to Mirror Mode in the BIOS. The other day we received an alarm: Failure detected on Internal Dual SD Module SD2 We’d never seen a failure like this so we had no idea how to fix it, and the Internet was only slightly helpful (hence the point of this writeup). Here’s what we did to replace it. Note: I’m certified to work on Dell servers, and have been messing with …

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Keeping My Blade Options Open

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One of the types of advice I really appreciate is that which helps me to keep my options open. I have a team from Dell in the office this week, configuring a giant pile of equipment we bought. The equipment includes a bunch of blade servers. We’ve relied on rack-mount equipment for decades, but with a push towards a private cloud we opted to jump into the early 21st century with blades. I’ve had relatively little experience with blades so it’s nice to have more experienced people around. When I’m designing a system I always try to figure out what it’ll need to look like four years from now. Seeing the future is the hardest part of designing a system. …

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VMware vSphere 5.5 & Dell 12G Servers: Reliable Memory Technology

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A few days ago Dell released BIOS updates for their 12th generation servers. Among all the notes about preparations for the Intel E5-2600 v2 refresh there’s one line that’s of interest to those of us thinking about running vSphere 5.5 on our version 1 12G hardware: New Memory Operating Mode setup option ‘Dell Fault Resilient Mode’ This is a patented new technology from Dell, wherein the hypervisor and system hardware can work together to place the hypervisor in a more redundant section of memory. Dell servers have shipped with a variety of tricks to protect against memory faults, things like Memory Page Retire, which will dynamically remove a page from usable memory space if it encounters an error. However, to …

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