Dell PowerEdge R710 build PART 6/9 | 4 ways to install boot drive

hi guys so welcome to the art of server today's video is basically the continuation of the r7 10 build series part 6 and we're going to talk about boot drive options so one of the questions I get a lot from people who are building are there are seven ten is hey where can I install a boot drive where can I install my operating system so I was originally going to show you guys five different options but as you know I usually test out everything before I share it with you guys and one of those options although theoretically sounded like it would work I have not been able to get it to work I've tried multiple times and it's failed on me repeatedly so I'm actually going to only show you four boot drive options today but I'll talk about the fifth one so that you can look into it if you want to and see if you can get it to work if you can get it to work you know leave a comment and help me out you know I'd be really curious to see how what I might have done wrong or how to do that so alright so first option for a boot drive is probably the most obvious and that is to put your operating system one of the primary drive bays ok and and I'm not really going to go into this option that much because that's a fairly straightforward option that's probably the way it Dell intended it to work originally when they released a server but you do need to configure your boot drive on the LSI controller and I already made a video about that and that's why I'm not really going to talk about this that much but I'll leave a card up in the corner here for you so that you can check out that video on how to set up your boot drive selection on the LSI controller alright so that's option number one now let's get into the inside of the server here and let's talk about these some of the other options so one of the things I really like about Dell I think since about the 8th generation of they're powered series of servers is that they usually have a USB a port internal in the system and sometimes it's on the motherboard but in the r7 10 it's actually up here by this I don't know what you call it the i/o panel or something like that but anyway there is a USB a port here and now this is USB 2.0 only so it's not a very fast USB port but either way for a boot drive you don't really need something super fast and so you can always install a USB Drive and install your operating system on this and this is completely bootable I have a one of the easy store 32 gig USB drives in here and I already have Linux installed on this USB Drive I actually have Linux installed on all the different boot options I'm going to show you today and so later on in this video we'll get into the idrac interface and I'll show you the boot drive selection for all these different options right now just kind of show you the physical layout okay so that's option number two okay so the third boot option for the are 710 and you might have noticed this already but there is a SD card reader right here and now this is a additional option it doesn't come by default with the r7 tens if you get in our 710 that actually already has this installed that's terrific but a lot of our seven tens will not have that option so it's something you have to buy separately and install it as an add-on option now this is basically I think a USB SD card reader and it connects with this cable too so this board here comes out easily like this it's very easy to install by the way there's these two prongs on this side here that go into the slots over here and then you simply just kind of press it down until the other side clicks in and it secures it in place now you do have to connect this to the board over here through this cable and I believe that's that makes the USB connection and basically powers this SD card reader I will leave the part number to this SD card reader as well as this cable on the screen here and I'll also leave a even affiliate link for you to buy this on eBay if you want to and keep in mind if you buy through those links you will be supporting my channel I do get a slight Commission for any purchases you make through those eBay affiliate links now one thing to note if you are going to buy this option make sure to get it with the cable without sometimes it's sold without the cable and usually end up spending more if you just have to find the cable by itself so I would just go ahead and find something who are listing for this where it includes the cable and that way you can just kind of install the whole thing usually just worked out better that way okay so anyway you can install in our prices and I already have a Linux operating system installed on this SD card as well and that gives me a 64 gig boot drive okay which is probably a lot more than actually neat but you know you can choose any size FC card you want for installing a boot drive in the SD card reader okay so fourth option for a boot drive is the optical Bay so these are seven 10s often came with a DVD drive back when DVD drives and stuff like that we're still fairly useful sometimes you might not have it and then there'll be some sort of blank here that you can pull out but either way this optical Bay if you don't need the DVD which these days a lot of people don't need them anymore can you pull this out and show you you can replace the optical drive or the blank or whatever you have in here with one of these trays so this is basically a two and a half inch caddy that fits in the laptop optical drive format and so you can get one of these you can put a SSD in here and then install it in this slot and just simply plug in this cable and now you can use this as your boot drive option now if your are so intent did not come with a optical drive and you only have a blank here you might actually also need to get this cable so that cable is a special cable now I'll leave the part number to this cable on the screen for you so you can go look for this I will also leave a link in the description of this video so you can find this cable on eBay but this cable has a SATA connection that goes to the blue SATA port on the motherboard and by the way these SATA ports are all both of them are SATA 2 and there are not satisfy only run a 3 gigabit which is fine for an optical drive but my point is if you're going to put an SSD in here I would not spend a lot of money getting a really fast SSD because you're not going to be able to connect at 6 gigabits per second there's no SATA 3 support here ok so but as a boot drive that's probably just fine there's really no need to have a extremely fast boot drive anyway this cable here provides the SATA connection but it also provides a power connection here and this power connector connects to a plug that's underneath the fans here on the motherboard that provide power to the optical drive and it provides enough power for something like an SSD so that should work fine now one of the challenges of installing a boot drive you know getting creative and trying to find a way to install boot drive is that there's not a lot of power connections you know it's not unlike a normal like desktop PC where you have additional molex or SATA power plugs coming from the PSU you don't have that in the server environment usually you have just enough of you know what was what was originally designed to fit in server and so if you you know you guys you can see here there's additional opening space up here and you could easily velcro an SSD in here or something like that but the challenge is always finding power you do have the SATA for the data connectivity or you know if you add an add another SAS controller here you can obviously connect with some breakout cables but usually the part of the problem is finding power so having this cable is a convenient way because it kind of solves that problem for you and there's already a plug for that that goes neatly in now of course you can always get creative and run solder some wires to the power distribution here and get some power that way as well but you know that's just a little bit more elaborate than I think a lot of people will want to do so I'm just kind of showing you some of the more straightforward options to get a boot drive in here okay so anyway I will leave the part numbers to the cable as well as links to the cable on eBay and the links to this two and a half inch drive caddy now one thing to note you'll notice that this drive caddy con just slides right out that's because there is supposed to be a bracket here that clicks you'll see this blue little dot here there's supposed to be something that attaches to the back of the optical drive that is kind of like a retention clip to keep the optical drive from sliding out I found that that little clip did not fit on this two and a half inch caddy so I don't have it here and that's why this is a little bit loose maybe I need to find longer screws maybe you know maybe there's a different two and a half inch caddy that will fit better I don't know I haven't really looked into it but you know honestly it's it's yeah if I push on it it slides out but it doesn't really slide out on its own that much so I'm not too worried about it if I was you know more worried about and I could not find a way to get that retention clip on I could for example put some felt tape on the bottom to kind of just increase the amount of friction so that this doesn't slide out easily so anyway there's multiple ways to address that if you are concerned about it but just something to note that these drive caddies at least for me the one I got didn't seem to easily accept the bracket that installs here so anyway I just wanted to point that out all right so before we turn on the server and we'll get on the idrac interface and I'll show you all these how all these boot options work I'll tell you a little bit about the fifth one so the fifth one is right over here the idrac module itself has a SD card slot and it's right back here it's called a V flash del V flash so and you have to get well you don't have to but I think in order to have a decent-sized partition on this thing you have to get a Dell you know special especially formatted created V flashcard this is an 8 gigabyte V flash card from Dell and you can create with one of these V flash things you can create up to a 4 gigabyte partition and you can then install an operating system on it and this device will show up as a boot device that you can use now here's the thing I found out about this option on Dells website actually there's a set of instructions showing you how to install ESX vmware on one of these and to boot off of it Dell F says officially it's not a supported method but they do give instructions on how to potentially do that I tried doing that not installing VMware but installing just a Linux distribution and the mechanics of it seems to go fine you install this you format it you create a partition it shows up as a boot device you start to install the install sees that as a boot device and starts installing on it everything is fine and dandy up until somewhere in the middle of the install ultimately the this Drive goes away and the card fails and I've done this now on two of these V flash cards so I'm not really sure what I'm doing wrong I don't know why it keeps failing during the installation and these cards basically get rendered unusable so maybe I just have bad luck and these are just you know at the end of their endurance I don't really know but anyway that would have been the fifth option but since I can't get it to work I don't really want to tell you guys that that's a workable option now for somebody else who might be watching this video if you know about setting up a OS or boot drive using the V flash and getting you know how to get that to work properly you know leave a comment and sure that with us shirt with me I'd love to learn and maybe with some tips I can try it out again I do have a few more of these sitting around so I could always try it again but I just could not get this to work all right so with that said let's close this guy up and let's get on oops let's the other way let's get on the idrac java console and boot this machine up and I'll show you the the boot options I've talked about today so far and show you how to select the boot boot order boot sequence and all that stuff and show you that you I already have operating systems installed on these three boot devices and I'll show you that actually can boot off of them so anyway all right let's go do that alright guys so here we are at the Java TV m2 that are seven ten let's go ahead and power this guy on alright this point I might hit f2 and we're gonna enter the system setup BIOS and I'll show you how all the boot options that I have installed right now will appear in the BIOS alright so here we are in the system BIOS let's go down to boot settings and I will show you the boot sequence Oh actually that's not that interesting that's just hard drive see embedded SATA that's just a SATA port let's do hard drive sequence all right so you can see here there are four different options to boot from the first one is the embedded SATA port a so that is that SATA port that's connected to the optical bait where I have the intel SSD there is the internal USB and so I have that sandjas cruiser USB stick there and then there's an internal sd card flash reader so that's that 64 gigabyte SD card and the integrated SAS so this is basically h200 controller I've enabled the boot support in that controller and it's I didn't select a specific boot device but by default it picks like the first two hard drives it detects as the boot device the primary and backup alright so you can see all four of those are listed in the boot sequence as a hard drive boot option and one other thing if you go into SATA settings so this is specifically regarding that intel SSD in the optical drive bay if you don't have a DVD drive in there by default very likely these SATA ports are disabled because if you enable one of these SATA ports and the device is not connected for whatever reason the r7 10 will complain about that and will show an error during post and ask you whether you want to go into the system set to correct it or to continue booting and so it kind of interrupts the boot sequence or the post process and so by default if nothing is connected to it so if you don't have the optical babe these ports are usually set to OFF so that they are disabled and that error doesn't show up you're bleeding the machine so just keep that in mind if you don't already have a DVD drive and you add something you might not immediately see it until you come in here and actually enable that SATA port now conversely if you are removing something make sure you come in here and turn that port off because if it's left disconnected again when you boot up during post it's going to report an error about that and it'll disrupt the post and boot process all right so that's what that looks like I'm gonna go ahead and boot one of these drugs so yeah you can see here there are a lot of boot options not really sure what this is about I'm kind of wondering if my rerun of grub picked up yeah so this I didn't know that and noticed this earlier but I had just updated the server and/or the installation I think this is probably on the SSD in the optical Bay and I reran grub and I think grub detected the other OS is installed on the other drives and I guess added them to its configuration so so here you'll see this is the internal flash this is the USB drive and not really sure what yeah this is all Advanced Options I don't know well anyway here let's just boot this one here this should be the the native kernel for the installation that is on the SSD all right so now I've labeled my installations because they're all sent out seven by the way I've installed Center seven on each of those devices so on the USB drive on the SD card and also on the SSD that's in the optical Bay and in order to distinguish them I've changed the host names on each of those installations so this is the r7 ten Center seven SATA underscore a so this is the one that is in the optical Bay and you'll see that those other boot options are there so right now we are booting off of SDG which is that intel SSD and just to kind of show you that you'll see that boot is on SDG too so that's that's the intel SSD right now so yeah anyway this is currently booting the intel SSD that's seen that optical babe and like I was telling you earlier let's take a look Loops so like I was telling you earlier this that SATA port is a SATA to only so it's only three gigabits so you'll see current speed satisfied has three gigabits even though this intel SSD is capable of six qubit as you can see here you're not going to connect any faster just because the limitation of that SATA port so you know if you want to get a a SATA 2 SSD that's probably perfectly fine as well so anyway just make note of that don't expect this boot option to be a six gigabit option here alright let's go ahead and reboot this thing and I'll boot into the other boot devices so you can see that that works as well alright so I just pressed f11 to get into the boot manager so that I can manually select one of the other boot devices to boot from okay so here's the boot manager now if you go down to hard drive see you'll see that all those different boot devices that we saw earlier in the BIOS are listed here so we've already booted off the embedded SATA port a which is that SSD in the optical Bay so this time let's boot off of the internal USB Drive and show you that that also works alright so as you can see the hosting here is now are some 10 - CentOS 7 - USB underscore hint so this is the name I gave the the installation that is on that USB Drive all right so as before we'll be able to see all the Sigma the first six are the hard drives in the front base and now there's the SSD the USB drive that we're currently boot dog booted off of and then also the flash reader and I guess in this case let's see I don't think we're able to see much on the let's I don't have smarts oh okay I don't have the Smart View chill installed here let's go ahead and install that yeah as you can see this is a completely different installation the last installation I apparently had the smarts ETL tool already installed I apparently have not installed it here so yeah so you're really not going to get much smart data obviously because this is not a normal SAS or SATA device this is a USB flash drives and just to confirm you can see that slash boot here is on SDH and you will see that indeed SDH is the SanDisk Cruiser Glide 3.0 USB drive there right so you actually see that in Ellis USB which apparently I don't have as well I wonder what package has that install this be utils maybe is there such a thing okay there is okay so now I can run Alice USB and you can see that I think this is the the SanDisk USB drive right here and then there's that other Flash reader flash card reader okay so let's go ahead and reboot this and then we'll show you that it also boots off of the SD card reader okay so again I went ahead and press f11 to get into the boot manager so that I can manually select what device I want to GU from okay once again we'll go down to the hard drive C option and we've already booted off the USB we booted off the SATA port a which is the SSD in the optical Bay and so the last option here is the SD card flush reader well actually the the fourth option that would be the last option but that's just the H 200 SAS controller so again I'm not going to go into that part because that's just kind of very trivial and I have that other video that you guys can follow if you want to figure out how to set up the boot device in the LSI controller alright so let's go ahead and boot the SD card out alright as you can see the host name here has changed as well this one is called r7 10 - CentOS 7 - SD flash so that's the installation of CentOS 7 on that 64 gigabyte flash card so again let's do ellis cose DF will show you that boot is now on SDI an SDI is in fact the flash reader and this is a 64 gigabyte so you'll see Ruth has 40 homes that has 19 so that's about 59 gigabytes of space and there's probably some space oh there's a gig lost to /boot so anyway this is roughly the 60 gigabytes or 64 kilobytes or whatever it is but yeah so there it is so it boots off of the flash reader it boots off of the USB Drive and boots off of the SSD that is in the optical bank and of course it'll boot off of any of the hard drives in the front bay as well but you know again that's you know probably the most obvious option so I'm not going to talk about that okay so anyway those are the four boot options that you have on the AR 710 and you know I'm personally fairly comfortable with having a USB flash drive with certain brands of USB drives I've had pretty good experience with that so I know some people are concerned that USB flash drives just aren't reliable enough and you know that may be the case I guess I've had some of them fail on me but and those were Samsung branded ones that failed on me but the SanDisk ones I've had pretty good luck with haven't had one fail on me and I've got several systems not just my own but deployed at customer sites and stuff like that in my consulting gigs and I haven't had any of those fail yet so you know I think the USB boot option is also a pretty good one I don't know about the SD card it does work obviously but I've never used that long-term was so I don't really know you know at least in my limited experience I don't really have nothing to say about you know that's a reliable option or not but yeah so the USB drive I've had really good luck with that obviously the SATA SSD in the optical Bay you know that's well that's that's what it is right I mean we've been people have used SSDs for many years now so you can guess how reliable that is okay so anyway I want to just share that with you guys and hopefully this helps answer some questions and also gives you some ideas so maybe some of these things were options you didn't think about before and you know help you guys out with your are so intent server builds alright so hopefully you found this useful if you liked it please give me a like and be sure to subscribe and there will be one more part to this R 710 build series where I'm going to actually install some stuff you know these installations were basically just for test purposes this server is going to a gentleman named Mike who has already contacted me saying hey we really like to pick up the server from me and he's told me that he's going to use procs box on this and so in the next video I'm going to install proxmox and I'm going to set up a VM with that GPU that I've shown you in the how to install a GPU in the AR 710 video and we'll set up Plex in that VM and just you know play with it a little bit and see how well it does as a hypervisor with a Plex virtual machine in it and and that will wrap up the series so in that next part and and then this server will be headed to Mike and hopefully enjoy a new home alright so anyway that's that's it guys thank you very much for watching bye-bye

Channel: Art of Server

Views: 24,717

Keywords: Dell, PowerEdge, R710, boot drive, OS drive, 0RN354, 0KY386, 0GP703

Id: 6eVd1oJh4Q8

Length: 30min 5sec (1805 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 22 2019