Dell PowerEdge R710 build PART 1/9 | fixes, bios and firmware updates, and factory reset

hi guys so I've gotten quite a few requests from people about asking asking for me to do a end-to-end build video and I've also got a request about hey how do I update the BIOS and the firmware on my Dell PowerEdge server and it just so happened that I was able to pick up another r7 10 and I just got this I haven't really checked it out yet and I thought why not make a series of videos of showing how I get this server ready for something like freenas or on raid or something like that with you know some of the products that I sell from my eBay store and so this is going to be a multi-part series we're starting this will be part one where we're gonna go look at this box see what's in it we'll have we'll go through updating the BIOS and all the firmware will go through changing out any parts that we need for example I can already see this is missing a few hard drive brackets so I'll probably get those replaced and we'll upgrade the CPU and maybe the RAM - I don't know about anything along the way that you know we've discovered we might want to change out or something like that we'll cover that all the way to the point where this machine is pretty much ready to go and at that point I'm going to put this on eBay for anybody who might want to buy something that's already kind of ready and set up to go ok so like I said immediately first off we see that we're missing some hard drive brackets we got these fillers I tend to like to have everything set up so that you know they're ready to go and so I'm probably gonna replace these with some proper harddrive trays these look like they originally came with some 450 gigabyte SAS drives at least that's what the label says right here there's no hard drives in these I'll probably remove that label since it's no longer relevant and I like to kind of keep things clean get get rid of that I don't know what kind of processors in here I don't know how much RAM is in here yet and I haven't powered it on yet but before I power it on let's take a look inside and see what we have in there okay so looks like we have a perk six card so that's a SAS one RAID controller we'll probably end up getting rid of that it's got the cables to the battery which is over here we're probably going to get rid of that we're gonna replace that with an H 200 with IT mode which is what you need for something like freenas the cables are going to need to be swapped out these are the 80 80 84 84 connectors I believe so we're going to need the cables for the H 700 which has the 8087 type of cable connectors let's see what's under here well there's quite a bit of RAM or at least a lot of RAM modules in this thing I see six per socket I don't know what kind of RAM this is let's see I'm assuming they're all gonna be the same and this looks like it's four gigabytes okay so that would be what eight eight eight 24 48 so probably there's 48 gigs of RAM in this thing don't know what kind of processors in there I don't know if I'll be able to read it it might be too much thermal compound to read it but let me just kind of check yeah there's I'm not gonna be able read that without wiping it clean so let me just put this back and we can kind of take a look at the [Music] we can take a look at it from inside the BIOS otherwise where looks like we're missing a few PCI covers here I'll probably get those four places as well and yeah that's about it so there's a couple of things I think I'd like to Rio it looks like it has the idrac Enterprise module here so that's that's kind of nice they don't always come with that and I really like to have that so we got the idrac Enterprise we're missing PCI slots we need to replace the RAID controller got to get rid of this cabling and replace that and let's see what's under the fans here okay yeah nothing out of the ordinary I'm not even sure if this is a working machine so I hope it is I was told that it should be but I actually haven't tried it yet so but everything looks to be in good order it's actually fairly clean sometimes I get servers that are from a dusty environment and they can be filled with a lot of dust but this really doesn't seem like much dust at all so I'm guessing this is from a data center that had clean air [Music] okay all right so let's go ahead and just turn this guy on just see if it even powers on or if there are any problems and stuff like that they've already got everything plugged in I've got the power cables in I've got it hooked up to my KVM switch okay let's turn it on [Music] all right I'm gonna press f2 to enter yeah so there's that 46 that we saw earlier in there that seems to be working I don't know what processor is a 2.8 gigahertz quad-core there's two of them that's taking unusually long something's not quite right and the other thing I noticed was the LED panel there that should be blue or if there's an error should be amber but it's not lighting up at all so something's not quite right there and also the fact that the fans are going full blast is kind of strange usually it would have settled down by now so I'm guessing there's might be some fault condition that's causing the the fancy go at full full speed and yeah this is this definitely doesn't seem right it doesn't take this long for the idrac to come online okay I Drex a communication failure so definitely it looks like the idrac module might be faulty on this machine now it's trying to try to reboot ok well let's let's turn this off and I guess I'll have to maybe replace the idrac module to see if that gets to work all right I'm gonna go ahead and power this off now all right let's open this guy up and see what's going on here so the idrac is well this is the idrac enterprise module but there should be another part the counterpart to this that's the actual I guess they call idrac Express module I don't quite see it normally it's nearby maybe it's underneath this raid card so let's let's go ahead and take this out [Music] okay I'm just gonna put the cable to over here for now and let's oh yeah you know what I see it right there there's the I direct module so yeah I definitely have to remove this raid card so let's pull this out for an out and to get these guys out you have to kind of bend back these brackets to clear the card okay so that's the I direct module so this might have gone bad I don't know let's let's get this out and then I'll look through some of my other machines and see if I might be a fine a replacement for this remove the spring and I think you can just pull up on this okay there we go alright so I'm gonna try replacing this and see if that gets this machine to boot past that error all right I'll be right back alright so I'm back here I found this other idrac Express module from another server it was uh I think our 410 and this is the one that we just pulled out as our 710 that might be bad so I think they're the same generation they look almost identical except at the bracket the plastic bracket here is quite different so I might have to swap the brackets and pull this board out and put it in here so let me go ahead and remove this module from the plastic bracket it looks like all you need to do is there's these two plastic tabs so let me just kind of pull the back go back and yep okay so that comes up it was easy enough and same thing on this [Music] okay so let's go ahead and put this guy in this bracket and yeah back into the are some ten let's see if this will help us get past that error about not being able to communicate with the idrac so I'll just add in there this is kind of different a lot of these systems usually have some sort of I don't know this is kind of different usually there's like a like a plastic like one of these blue things that kind of snap on to it this you just kind of press on I guess and of course there was that spring clip we had so let's put that back on let's see which way like this [Music] okay so that does that that's I'm gonna go ahead and we're not gonna use this but for now let me just put this rate card back in [Music] okay battery cables back in so this is the one that might be bad I'll put this aside in case this is not the problem I'll maybe put it back or put this in the other server I took it out of all right let's see if we can turn this guy on and see if it works all right guys so I just replaced the idrac Express module that I think might have been faulty because the last reboot we got stuck on the idrac module so I've replaced that but we're gonna turn it on and see if that solves that problem and hopefully that'll be the only thing we need to fix before we kind of move on to the next steps here so so that light didn't turn on before so that is certainly different oh now I have fan 1 rpm exceeds so there's looks like there's an issue with fan 1 right now but at least this is showing up last time this didn't show at all so I hope that that means to idrac module is working now but it looks like we still have another problem with this machine alright let's look at the monitor I see what we see here the next thing here should be the idrac all right so yeah idrac is working now so it looks like the idrac Express module was bad the one that we just replaced seems to allow it to boot up it looks like it already has a default setting so that's good no boot device ok so before I boot this machine up let's look at one of the issues here it says that we have fan redundancy lost check I don't know if you guys can see that and we get a little closer it says check fan fan redundancy loss [Applause] I believe it said fan one [Applause] and I go back what is this all right let's see can I go to air one okay so air one tells me that fan one rpm is either too low or too high probably too low and error too is just telling me that the redundancies lost because one fan is is down all right so let's take a quick look at that I'm going to open up the chassis now one way to verify this is to look at the fans and see what's going on here so these are clearly spinning and that one is not so if I pull it out yeah you can see it's not spinning at all right all right so it looks like we have to replace a fan as well gosh this one has a lot of problems I wasn't expecting that but yeah if you took out one of these good fans you'll see it's still spinning when you take it out that's one way to check to just pull it out and see if it's still spinning if it's dead it'll be like this one where there's there's no motion at all all right so it looks like we're gonna have to get a fan so I'm gonna get that let me turn it off I'm hoping you guys heard anything that I said earlier with the fans on I don't know I'm in the middle recording this but hopefully you heard that but basically it looks like fan one is bad and I'm gonna have to replace that before we move forward on this machine all right so I'm gonna go buy a fan and then we'll come back to this again once I have that alright guys so I'm back here at the r7 ten the last segment we discovered a bad fan on this machine it's been a couple days I've ordered a replacement fan and I've ordered some rear PCI cover brackets that are I believe these are Dell ones so we're gonna put those on just for completeness I like to keep things kind of neat and you know I know this it doesn't really matter that much but anyway all right so let's go ahead and just replace this hopefully this works and we'll go ahead and replace these PCI brackets as well so I don't know if you guys ever worked on the r7 10 but it's got these kind of funky plastic things that hold the PCI brackets in it's meant to be kind of coulis so you don't have to loosen any screws but I'm not a big fan of these things they kind of work but because it's plastic they tend to kind of break and also I've seen cases where has these little spring clips that kind of apply pressure to the brackets so they don't come off and I think sometimes they get bent or stuck or something like that people just jam it in and and yeah and they just kind of get ruined so anyway it's it's okay if you're kind of a meticulous careful person but you know but if you're getting a server second hand you don't know how it's been treated before and I often see these things either broken or you know just not really working right but all right let's get PCI bracket cover there and let's see so there's a this a little notch that goes in there and these Springs just kind of push up against the PCI brackets so there you go all right [Music] yeah this one looks okay as well okay so this one's not too bad I've seen some are seven tens they're obviously mistreated at some point and you know these things didn't look too good but this one seems to be okay all right so we got our rear bracket covers in and I'm going to go ahead and put the cover on and hopefully this time when we turn it on we're not gonna see all those errors anymore I'm hoping there's nothing else wrong with this machine at this point all right there's the bad fan all right let's just power it on let's see how this goes I was hoping that would go well there we go hey it's blue again so that means that fan will is working that air is gone let's see what's on the monitor it's also a lot quieter how many of you guys noticed that from the previous videos now that the fan redundancy is okay and hydrect modules okay it's it's a way way quieter than it was before one of these days I want to make a video with a sound meter so you guys you know have some objective numbers that you can have to kind of gauge how much noise these machines make but when they're in working condition you know this is actually relatively quiet and when I do that video I also put the machinery under load and see how how noisy it gets without a fault condition alright let's see here idrac is working as before it's just trying to boot by I don't have anything in there to boot yet but okay it looks like the machine is finally in a working state alright so this is good so the next step here is well here I don't really need this right now but the next step here is I'm going to update the firmware the BIOS and all that stuff on this thing and bring it up to date before we start changing things out or anything else out so right now it looks like I got the machine in a working state there's a couple of things I need to order some of the hard drive brackets to replace these blanks I want to remove these stickers that are not relevant to this machine and like I said in last time there's a the SAS controller and the cables need to be replaced I got to pull out the battery and and then we know we're gonna have something that'll be really nice for freenas or something like that so alright so in the next segment I'm going to boot up I'm gonna connect this thing to my network and I'm gonna log into the idrac interface and I'm gonna log in and show you how to update I'm gonna boot off of a little USB Drive I have like CentOS Linux and I want to show you how to download all the updates that you need and how to apply them and get this thing kind of fully updated and reset back to the factory defaults all right okay guys so here I am logged into or not logged in yet but I'm at the I direct interface the web interface and if you recognizes this is like an ancient version of the IDE rack interface so I suspect that this is actually really old so we're gonna go ahead and login so by the way if you guys don't know the default login and password for idrac is usually root and calvin as the password so that's CA L VI N and if you don't have the ID rec already reset to its default which you can do from the console and you know you've not able to log in with the default passwords then go to the console hit ctrl e when you see the ID wrecked load up and then go in there and just reset the factory defaults and then the password will be what the login and password would be root in Kelvin so just a little tip there in case you've bought a used machine and it's already got some password aren't that you don't know that's how you can get around it later on once I've upgraded all the firmwares and the the idrac firmware as well I'll show you how how to go about doing the factory reset step-by-step so ok so let's login here yeah this is definitely really old let's come on sometimes you got to refresh it a little bit okay so the BIOS version is 6.30 the idrac here looks like firmware 1.13 done these are a1 so yeah I think that's definitely old I think the latest is 2 something so when when I show you how to go download the firmware and all the updates we'll see that as well so anyway I'm pretty sure we're gonna do some updating on this machine let's go ahead and go to support delcom and so I guess it redirects me to this place but once you come here you can pretty much find anything all while there's all the updates to your server so I usually like to go I mean you could enter your service tag number here and it'll automatically figure out what it is you're looking for but you know if you don't want to do that you can always go to browse all products we're gonna look at servers today PowerEdge servers the r7 10 is a rack server so we'll go there and we'll look for r7 10 right there ok so let's see drivers & downloads that's where we want to be ok so something to note for you guys if you're doing the BIOS update you know or any kind of firmware update provided by Dell there's three primary ways you can do this you can download the update programs for Windows and so you can pick Windows here or you can download the update programs for Linux basically and or some other flavor of Linux so those are the two primary platforms I think there's also at least in the past they've also had like a bootable ISO disk that had all the various firmwares and so that way you don't have to install them out bring some you just boot that disk so there's a couple different ways but you know unfortunately it doesn't cover all operating systems so if you're using something that's like FreeBSD base such as FreeNAS or something like that it's usually a little bit harder to find the right programs to update your firmware of BIOS and all that stuff on your server so so I recommend that you know with Windows you kind of need to deal with the licensing scheme although you could you know just use an eval installation but you know I tend to like to use Linux just because you know there are separately no license encumbrances there so I'm going to go ahead and pick Red Hat Enterprise 7 and typically because a lot of businesses use the Red Hat Enterprise typically this is some one of the more well supported options of that in Windows really so you know you're less likely to run into a problem picking this platform okay so let's go category let's start with the BIOS so it looks like we have version 6.6 to zero and this is considered urgent I suspect there's some fixes for some of the recent Intel CPU vulnerabilities or something like that probably and you can see that we were at 6.3 down to 0 so definitely we're gonna need that one so I'm gonna go ahead and download this but this is the browser here is in my desktop and you know you could download it here and then transfer it to your server but I'm just gonna go ahead and copy the link and I'm gonna download it directly to the server so let me make a directory called Dell /r 7-10 [Music] we'll go in here and so I'll go ahead and just paste the link here okay so there's the BIOS update alright let's see what else we have Diagnostics this doesn't really matter embedded so this is the idrac and yeah you can see this is version 2.92 so that's a lot newer than you know what was here those at version 1.13 so okay so let's go ahead and download this one as well [Music] okey-dokey and fiber channel we don't have anything like that in there let's look at firmware this looks like it's for the MD one thousands or kind of external storage arrays so let's skip that lifecycle controller you know let's go ahead and get this one I don't really know if it applies but it can't hurt to try okie doke and let's see what else network so this machine has the quad port let's see so let's look at yeah so this is a Broadcom a quad port Broadcom gigabit network card and so by the way this is a little bit confusing I notice this change recently but I guess Broadcom must have sold the intellectual property for this to QLogic and so a lot of these things are now renamed as QLogic so that's why you're actually gonna look for but the chip name is still the same is still like BCM something so let's go ahead and look for firmware here suspect that there will be something you know let me do a search for the word firmware and fasting - no that's probably not it that's a 10 gig card so that's probably not it I don't think it's a 6100 series let's see what else we have here hey guys so yeah sorry I had some problems trying to find the Broadcom gigabit network card firmware update and as you saw in the earlier segment it just wasn't appearing anywhere that I could find here and it should be under the BCM 57 X X so if you if you look at the card here the drivers called VN x here and so I'm looking through the colonel message log and you can see that this is identified as a broad continent extreme to be cm 550 709 and so that's the controller model that I have and there's no mention of firmware for that here there's drivers source code there's user guides but I couldn't find the firmware so I took that name the broad kinetic stream BCM 5709 and just did a Google search for broad kinetic stream tube ECM 57 on our firmware update del and it gave me all these links and you can see they're different versions here and what I found out is that you know like I was naturally going for the latest version so I think this one here is the latest 20.8 so when you kind of open that up you know here here's the firmware package you can download well that's the signature actually but here's the firmware package for Windows here's the firmware package for Red Hat Linux and I was about to download this but if you go further down and look at compatible system you'll see that the are the oldest system it supports is the twelfth gen are seven twenty same thing here are seven twenty so are seven ten is not listed anywhere here so this is probably not going to work and so basically I had to go through a couple of these links as you can see I've clicked on several of these and what I found so there's this once the 7.10 eighteen version and this certainly if you go down here and certainly does support the r7 ten so this is likely candidate that we could use but I also found this other page which uses a new name since I guess this was transferred to QLogic so under QLogic there is a 7.12 which is newer than the 7.10 and this is pretty much so it's 7.12 dot 17 this is pretty much the latest version that i can find on google so unfortunately adele doesn't make it easy for you to find this it so hopefully this helps you guys out if you're looking for this firmware update as well I would just do a search on Google and if you find a newer version than this by the way let me know in the comments because I did a little bit of digging and really that was the newest version I could find that supported the r7 ten there was a 29.4 21.4 as well and that did not let's see which one is yeah this is the 21.4 so this is probably the latest and greatest this was updated February 20 19 so just about four months ago and unfortunately this also does not support the are 7 to 10 ok so we won't be able to use this one but this looks this one the 7.12 does support let me go down here onto our 7:10 all right so let's go ahead and download this package copy link all right so that I think that's all the firmwares and bios's and stuff like that that was available I'm gonna go ahead and close out these tabs here and yeah so I think that's all that's available that I could find so one thing is these files they're self extracting executable scripts so you do have to set the execution bit on these they all end in dot bin so I'm just going to do starve in and that should set the execution so now I should be able to run these updates now one thing the caution here I'm logged in via SSH in a remote terminal I would not recommend running a BIOS a firmware update over SSH because you could lose network connectivity and in that case you know the program could terminate abruptly and end up you know causing some damage to your firmware or BIOS so that's a little bit risky so I don't recommend you do that but what we can do is use the remote console all right so let's login to the remote console let's go and to distract you so this is where we've downloaded all the firmwares packages so if you do a firmware update through the remote console or directly at the console at your keyboard monitor let me minimize this if this disconnects it doesn't really matter the program will still continue running and you can simply you know go to the physical keyboard and monitor of your server to see what's going on or try to reconnect the itraq for to a console app so in if whereas if you did it over SSH and the SSH essen terminated the it might abruptly interrupt the program and so you don't want that to happen in the middle of a firmware or BIOS update alright so we've got five different BIOS firmware update packages let's give it a go here with the BIOS so remember earlier we assigned the execute permission did all these files so we can just now simply run them like this now in the background this these are self extracting scripts its extracting all the content and doing some checks and now it's showing you kind of the release notes and so on I recommend that you kind of read through these a little bit if you care as you can see I had suspected this is probably to address some of the security vulnerabilities here so you can see that that's mentioned but anyway to move forward you just press Q to get out of the release notes and it'll do this collecting collecting inventory things so it'll try to find out what you already have and it says that it detected that we have vials 6.30 and the latest is six not 6.0 so do we want to continue and you say yes here [Music] and this is going to take a while so I'm just going to sit back a little bit until this is done [Applause] okay so it looks like it's ready to reboot now so I highly recommend that you do these updates one at a time and then reboot instead of like saying no here and then trying to do all the other ones because they could potentially mess things up so I'm gonna go ahead and say yes to reboot here and we'll see that the BIOS update is a Finn defect and then we'll continue on to the other updates [Music] alright looks like the system is booting up now let's hope we'll see the BIOS version 6.60 alright so there we have version 6.60 so that update went successfully alright let's go ahead and log in and we'll continue applying the updates alright so we're done with the BIOS let's go ahead and do I believe this is the ID rack okay again it's just going to show you the release notes as you can see there are several security fixes and other things so I'm gonna go ahead and hit Q to get out of there and it's gonna collect inventory and tell me whether had found a newer version or not so as we saw earlier the version of the itraq right now is 1.13 and the current version that's in this package is 2.9 - so we're gonna go ahead and do so again this can take quite a while so I'm just gonna sit back and let this run and I'll be back when it's done [Music] alright it looks like well the idrac KVM dropped out probably because the firmware is being updated that's okay let's see [Music] we can reconnect here all right so took a little while for the idrac web interface to come back online but as you can see this is now the new interface that's more familiar if you've seen the recent ones so let's go ahead and log into this again there we go so it's it's coming together I think it just needs a little bit of time so you can see here BIOS version 6.6 dot zero which we updated firmware now is at two point nine to build zero five so this is coming online let's see if we can get the remote console here all right there we go and you can see the update completed successfully all right so that's done let me minimize this so in the case of the itraq I don't think I'm too worried about having to reboot the whole machine since it kind of essentially rebooted the whole idrac module itself so I'm gonna go ahead and run the next update so that's the lifecycle controller I'm not actually sure if that applies here but let's go ahead and try it okay so it looks like if found version 1.1 dot 0 dot 188 and it has version 1 seven 1.7.5 dot four let's go ahead and run this update alright again I'm just gonna walk away for a little bit and let this thing do its thing and I'll be back in a sec [Music] hmm it looks like the update for this failed all right I might try it again a little bit later but let's move on to the next thing here so the next one is the network firmware and the sass let's go ahead and do the SAS controller with just a perk 6 I'm not really going to use this card but you know just for completeness sake let's go ahead and do that okay it looks like the firmware for the perk 6 is already up to date so there's probably no reason to update this so I'm gonna go ahead and skip this for now and let's complete the network firmware update alright and then after this I'm gonna reboot the machine and maybe even power it off and then powered on after letting it sit I wanna see if maybe that might clear things up for the lifecycle controller update to work but let's finish the network update first okay it looks like we currently have firmware version 4.6.1 oven teen so let's go ahead and do that all right now it looks like we need to reboot the system so I'll go ahead and do that [Music] alright we're fully booted up all the Ethernet interfaces are up let's take a look at one of these alright and you'll see the firmware is now seven twelve seventeen so the firmware update I believe was successful so I'm gonna go ahead and power this machine down now and unplug the power then I'm gonna cold start it and apply the life cycle update again and see if that works there okay so we've got the system booted back up and I'm logging into the idrac again okay and I'm gonna try to launch the remote console okie doke login here and let's try that lifecycle controller update it once again okay so interestingly it says this time that there is no update package currently installed you know do we want to continue I'm gonna go ahead and say yes I'm not really sure what this means in the last run I think you had detected an older version well let's see what happens [Music] alright it looks like the screen froze up and the idrac rebooted itself or something like that so maybe it took effect I am not really sure I'm waiting for the idrac to come back online and then we'll try to reconnect and see what happens looks like the itraq is back online to go ahead okay so one thing i mediately noticed is the lifecycle controller firmware here is now the one seven one point seven point five point four so it looks like the the firmware update took let's go ahead and launch the remote console here okay it looks like update success alright so I guess that's all it took we had to reboot the system and reapply the lifecycle controller firmware update and it took this time okay so this last segment let me go ahead and close this out so the last thing I want to do here is I want to show you how to reset everything back to factory default so I'm gonna go ahead and reboot this machine right now okay so keep an eye out here because when the idrac is being initialized here you're going to see a prompt to hit control e to get into the idrac configuration okay so right here I want to hit ctrl E and we can get into the idrac configuration utility so here is where you can reset the system to its default values so for example if you have received a unit where someone had already set a password and you don't know what that is and you know you just want to clear everything out so you can always get into this at the console you know you don't need a password and click that to get into it you can always get here you know without any password property so this is kind of like the way to bypass it so you go down here to Reese reset to default hit enter and then you say yes and then you know give it some time you'll see the idrac I think reboot itself again so I'm not going to do this because I don't need to it's already been done but this is how you would reset the itraq to the default settings so that you can then use the default login and password for the iraq which is ruth and kelvin as i had mentioned previously alright so I'm gonna go ahead and cancel that and I'll get out of this alright guys so one last thing I want to show you before we conclude this video is how to reset the BIOS settings so that's stored in NVRAM now in a previous video in order to restore the Dell logo i had cleared the nvram via jumper on the motherboard and i'll leave a card to that video in case you want to do it that way but there's actually another way to do that and that's why I'm going to show you today so let's go ahead and power this guy on and get into BIOS and I'll show you that there's a they call it a soft NVRAM reset that you can do without actually opening up the box [Music] so all we have to do is wait for this post to happen and then up in the upper right corner there will be a prompt to press f2 to enter the BIOS setup and when we see that we'll hit f2 and get in there and then I'll show you the key sequence to reset the BIOS settings to the factory defaults all right we got the Dell logo and we're just waiting for the prompt here are there we are now hit f2 and you'll see that it says entering system setup so that's that will get us into the system BIOS once the rest of the post process is complete alright so now that we're in the BIOS setup screen the way to reset all the settings to factory defaults there's actually a kind of interesting key sequence so what you have to do is make sure that the num lock is on so that's mine unlike so that's on turn on caps lock as well so you'll see there's caps lock and then scroll lock so once you have all three of these key locks are activated then you hit alt e' alt F so that's F and then out B and the system will reboot with factory default settings so you'll see it just rebooted itself we'll wait for this to finish and then I'm going to get back into the BIOS and make some of the changes that I want to make on the server so definitely one of the settings I want to change is as a memory test during post that takes an awfully long time and I don't really think it matters that much so I definitely want disabled that all right so now that we're in the BIOS let's go in here I want to disable the system memory testing get out of that processor settings let's enable virtualization technology in case we want to use this as a hypervisor which is a great use case for this our 7-10 since it has pretty good memory capacity and I think that's it for that the embedded SATA controller is fine as is boot settings let's do hard disk emulation for the USB Drive integrated devices I don't think I really need to do anything here but I'm going to disable the where is it [Music] I'm yeah I'm gonna change this so I don't plan to do any pixie booting so I'm gonna just turn that off so we don't have to wait for that to go so I'll have it I'll leave it enabled but I I'm just gonna turn off the pixie booting option and that's probably there's nothing there I need to same thing here and I think well that's a user-defined string I'll just leave it as is power management I think that should be fine as is okay so that's all there is I'm gonna exit Save Changes alright so that pretty much concludes this video we went through the process of getting this server set up and going we had to replace some parts that apparently have gone bad namely the idrac Express modules seem to have gone bad so we got that replaced turns out that one of the fans was bad so we got that replaced then we got the system booted up we updated the BIOS and all the firmwares the lifecycle controller firmware took a slight roundabout way to get there we had to do a kind of a clean reboot in order to have the firmware update update take and then we reset everything to factory defaults I showed you how to reset the idrac to factory default settings I actually already did that and then set in the specific IP addresses that I wanted for this lab here so but I showed you where you can do that and then now we just finish resetting the BIOS to factory defaults and so these are the type of steps that I would normally take for server that I'm planning to use for myself and in particular you know resetting the things like the BIOS settings and the idrac to factory defaults I find to be kind of good generally good practice because sometimes you know since if you are especially if you're buying these machines used you don't really know what other people have changed in the BIOS or the idrac or anything like that and so it's nice to have it at a factory default state because sometimes you know due to some setting that the previous owner had set you might run into a conflict you know with a PCI card that you're installing or maybe the way the the memory modules are set up or something like that so it's nice to just have it at a factory default and then make the change that you want starting from there and that way you're not chasing your tail wondering why something's not working even though you know maybe other people have said it works or maybe you have multiple machines and you know it works on one machine but not you know not the one you're working on sometimes I could be due to some obscure you know setting that hardly anybody ever touches but you know a previous owner needed to make a change there and now it's causing you problems as the next owner of the machine so I always like to kind of reset everything to factory default and then I know I'm starting from a known good state and then I can make changes along the way and you know if the change I make causes a problem then at least I know that it was due to a change that I made and not something that someone else had had made so anyway this machine is pretty much ready to go for you know what we wanted to accomplish in this video and in the next video I'm planning to update and modify the storage subsystem so that this will be ready for something like free Nassau run raid so basically that'll involve replacing the SAS controller the cables and I'm going to show you how to remove these labels nicely so that you know we can get rid of these labels that are no longer relevant for this machine alright so that's it for today's video I hope you enjoyed it if you liked it please hit the thumbs up for me and you know make sure to subscribe to my channel if you'd like to be notified of the next video in the series or other videos that I'll be making alright hey thanks a lot guys and have a good day bye bye

Channel: Art of Server

Views: 77,759

Rating: 4.9495268 out of 5

Keywords: Dell, PowerEdge, R710, BIOS update, firmware update, replace idrac module, replace fan, factory reset

Id: 8Z2_bTAR3FA

Length: 56min 12sec (3372 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2019