Dell PowerEdge R640 1u Dual processor Server - Review

hello this is Bob Pelerin CTO Bob and today I've got a pleasure to be talking about Dell PowerEdge our 640 this is usually the workhorse this is the server that I use the most in my clients and I recommend it's been it's been a great follow-up model to the r6 30 before that and the r6 20 before that basically you look here at some of the things first of all you'll notice it's branded Dell EMC this model has a two dual power supply it also has a dual CPU you can go up to twenty eight cores per CPU of course depending on when you're listening to this the different Intel processors will range they've got the silver the gold and the platinum and you can really get a lot of bang out of this a lot of power memory wise you'll see you can go up to three terabytes and as I'll show you in a moment when we look inside there's lots of slots into 24 Ram slots there ddr4 and they are ECC memory of course since this is a server enterprise-class machined so the first thing is the front bezel I really like the fact that it's got this LCD and to remove it there's show you this take it out and the LCD is actually built into a little bracket in the front so that's really nice this particular model as you can tell has eight bays for two and a half inch drives these could be of course SSD drives both in the SAS or SATA and right now I've got some basically spacers or things to block off the holes once you have dry of state space to come out quite easily now if you're wondering about serial number information they have always had this little pull out tab and gives you the serial number if you have purchased this with an ID rack the ID Rack is a subsystem built into it it's basically like a smaller computer I guess based on Linux probably and what it does it allows you to control things remotely so you can do things like reboot update firmware take control so you can take a look at the what would be transmitted off to the monitor it allows you basically to service these things without being physically on location it's very important now the reason I bring idrac up at this moment is in the back of this little thing with the serial number is a password username and password printed on the back for this particular machine this is done at the factory and when you purchase this it's a check mark that you select to have them print out this label now let's take a quick look at what is available from the front I've mentioned the spaces for the drives in the front you do have both for a see if I can see the exit here for it's basically in VGA for a monitor in case you need to if you've got a rack and you need to quickly see something you can go ahead and plug that in and of course you do have a USB port on the other end the power button is extremely small if you haven't seen one of those it is next to the USB and you basically have to go and press on this is done on purpose so that you have less you're less likely to press on the on-off button by accident now let's spin this around let's take a quick look at the back so what we've got here it's pretty typical of a server first off you've got dual power supplies these are in this particular case they are 750 watt you can go harder than that the idea of having two obviously as if one fails the other one continues to function so your server will survive a failure of one of these depending on the load of course and they're quite easy to put in and out as you just saw do that it clicks it's in I'm going to do is add the power cord this will turn green and you're up and running the rest you'll notice lots and lots of network ports on here this is they're all configurable when you purchase this you decide if you want to have some copper if you want to have fiber in this case what we have is two 10 gigabit ports and two one gigabit ports we have an optional card which I'll show you when I open this right now we've got sfp+ which allows us to have fiber we could also use an adapter and have additional 10g functionality bottom here is actually the idrac the very bottom port so that's the idrac system so that's what is going to allow you to provide remote support for this machine and of course you do have the VGA there's a serial port which most of us will no longer use you've got a couple of USB ports so if you're keeping track we had one in the front there's two in the back and as you'll see later there's one inside and that's a bit of a wrap up so let's take a quick look at what the inside looks like quite easy to remove of course in Iraq environment these would be on Rails so here we have a brand new machine and first off you've got the expandability so let's take a quick look you'll see how easy it is to remove the razor card and in our case we have as I mentioned an Intel network interface card which allows you to get fibre on there and if you so the razor could be changed out and put different cards but the man's quite simple you simply align it and it goes right back in let's see if I can do this so that worked out pretty well the other card is actually here you've got these everything that's blue indicates that you can move things you know press things and so it's quite simple to find out what's supposed to be moving as opposed to what's bolted or soldered in here so the card is obviously being protected and that was our network card here the rest we've got the power supplies I'd mentioned earlier there was another USB port inside of the server it is actually located right here behind the power supply I do have a little USB Drive in here and why would you have this inside a machine case you're wondering this will actually allow you to boot an operating system for example in this case I use a lot of VMware and so the ESXi six-point-seven boot is off of here I place it in there and from this moment forward I can boot on this when the version seven I'm gonna upgrade to version 7 I could replace this put version 7 put it in this way allows me to have multiple test environments it's a lot of people are using these to do the initial booting of the server a little tricky to put back in here just because of where it's located there we go next we have the they call the perc RAID controller and you see here that it has a battery so the battery is so it doesn't lose data in case of a power failure and it's got the heatsink on top of it it's actually this model is actually has eight gigs of caching on it so it's quite powerful and this of course connects back to this wire all the way back to the front to their drive bays so all the disks are connected back to that RAID controller I'm hoping you know raid is and that what the technology that allows you basically to survive the failure of a driver multiple drives depending on the setup and configuration you've done now to the heart of the system we have the two processors and this is where they'll put the silver gold platinum Intel processors and then all of the slots here the black ones being the empty ones all the slots are basically for memory so and again these are so the black ones are basically just spacers at this point they're literally just pieces of plastic and all this memory again is ddr4 ECC Ram in my case there are 32 gigs so it's quite easy to put in and of course in case you haven't seen one of these the back and I'll show you later at the back of the you know the back of the cover actually has a diagram as to what memory to put in when you've got one process or two processors in which order to put them in they're numbered next what we have is these fans these are high performance fans you have that option when you purchase this server the high performance fans obviously blow a lot of additional air the whole point here is to keep this well ventilated so these will push the air to the words the back as you can tell everything is aligned with the fans and if you can see the fins on the processor so these fins here really is to disperse the heat so you've got is these little tunnels that will happen in between the fins to cool it down and also for the RAM so you've got the air flowing in this direction so last but not least I guess what I can show you is the inside of the cover and the whole points to show you that you've got the instructions here related to multiple functions they'll tell you about the you know the rear view and so forth and most importantly is the memory information of course you can't find all this online and yeah maybe this is how to install and so forth this is useful really just when you're setting it up so you've enjoyed this little walkthrough of an R 640 this is going to be used in our lab for a few weeks for the testing with migrations from the six point seven of VMware to version seven and we're gonna do some high availability tests with other brands such as QNAP and that's it thanks to all the multiple network cards we'll be able to do lots of different scenarios I hope you've enjoyed this video please please help us out subscribe and give us us a thumbs up if you appreciated and enjoyed this video this is Bob pelegrin thank you for watching

Channel: Bob Pellerin

Views: 5,849

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Ctobob, Bob pellerin

Id: MTsc3jUL3jg

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 22 2020