New Server: Hardware Fundamentals

good morning everybody and welcome back to Next Door netadmin servers what is a server it's a common question I suppose from uh people who aren't usually working in the networking industry so since I'm about to talk all about servers let me quickly give a brief introduction to what a server is in case somebody's listening who doesn't already know you can think of a server as a really powerful version I suppose you could say of a desktop computer desktop computers typically have some limits that servers have much higher limits on for example a desktop computer might have quad core8 core somewhere in between there and then have hyperthreading as pretty standard on the lowest models and the highest models and somehow not in the middle so much servers can have a lot more cores lot more cores it's very uncommon to see anything with less than eight cores and 16 or 12 16 20 24 cores even up to 32 cores is not unheard of per CPU and servers may have one CPU they may have two CPUs they may have four CPUs all working at the same time memory limits are also generally speaking a lot higher a desktop in at least in my experience the desktops that I've looked at will typically max out around 64 gigs of RAM and a lot of desktops will have you know eight or 16 gigs of RAM and that's all most people will need unless you're into some really serious gaming or some other you know very media heavy work such as rendering or art or heavy really really really heavy duty gaming servers on the other hand will have gigs and gigs and gigs and gigs of memory for days the maximum could be something like 1.5 terabytes of Ram or higher depending on what you need so servers are just essentially really powerful computer computers that have a lot more resources than a standard desktop computer does beyond that they function mostly the same there's a few things that servers don't do as well as desktops primarily things like Graphics cuz you're not going to get a big chunky old graphics card into a thin oneu server it's just not a thing that's going to happen you can get that in bigger servers servers but that's a different case of its own and we'll cover that in a little bit I have a customer that needs to replace three servers in a failover cluster so this gives me the perfect opportunity to talk about what kind of servers I look for for what purposes and walk you guys through the process of going through all the hardware step by step and actually selecting I want this I want this and I want this but of course as is often the case with me I went through it and then I looked at the time and I went that took me what 40 minutes 45 minutes so this is going to end up being another two-parter because it's too much material to go through allinone sitting your your mind will completely blank out and I get that so today let's just talk about some of the basics of servers and how they're constructed I've already explained briefly in a very generalistic fashion what a server is I have used servers from several different manufacturers the most common brand we spec is Dell so I'm going to go into a little bit of detail on the tiers the general ranking of Dell servers just to give you a little bit of a feel for it and then we'll move on to some other topics that are not Dell specific they apply to all servers and that'll be useful for everybody no matter what model of server you get so but starting with Dell servers like I said um servers can come with one CPU two CPUs or four CPUs all working together uh for Dell the server line is called Power Edge there's two general types of servers you can have a tower server looks a lot like a desktop sits on on the floor it's a great Girt big thing pretty tall wide heavy yeah Tower ser servers are somewhat common in small businesses particularly in small businesses that don't have any sort of dedicated Network infrastructure so that's a that's a thing that's out there but a lot of our customers do have some networking infrastructure if you have a switch if you have a I was going to say Enterprise class router but that's not always the case either these days um some routers can come in a standard form factor same as a switch would do some of them don't and some of them you can get tricky and go hey this is a little thing that's designed to sit on a desk I'm going to get an adapter that puts it into a standard 19-inch rack that's always fun but yeah I just mentioned a standard 19in rack there are are racks they are about 6 feet tall they go from the floor 6 feet up obviously if it's 6 feet tall duh they're about 19 in wide the Gap in between the posts is 19 in wide you can have a two poost rack you can have a four poost rack which gives you more loadbearing capacity but it's very common to see a switch especially if you're dealing with 24 ports or 48 ports or more to have it sized to fit into this rack racks are also measured in terms of use or units uh if you took a look at my the video that I posted a little bit ago with a new open sense server that I got that was a oneu server just about what 1 and2 in I think is the equivalent I don't know honestly but a standard six foot rack floor to ceiling is 42 's so you can get a half rack at 24 or 20 U's you can get a little 12 U jobby to mount on the wall or whatever you want racks come in all sizes not all shapes but all sizes and so you can have a server that is a oneu server you can have a server that is a 2u server you can have a server that is for use a foru server is uh sometimes conver invertible because a tower server is often the same width as foru would be in height so you can take a 4u server and stand it on end and you'll actually have it convert into a tower server sometimes not always just sometimes in the power Edge family then you have these two types of servers generally speaking you have your Tower servers you have your rack mounted servers Tower servers are prefixed by a t rack mounted servers are prefixed with an r in the rack mounted servers specifically also in the tower servers to some degree but Tower servers are something that I don't have to deal with as much as rack servers but generally speaking in the model number the first digit gives you a general feel for where it is in the in the ranking for for lack of a better word um on the tiers for Dell servers something like A2 or A3 is entry level it's not sized for hugely demanding tasks it is sized for a lighter workload if you go all the way up to an eight or a nine that is a extremely heavy workload most of the servers that I spec will be somewhere in the 4 to range in terms of what the tiers are and this has changed quite a bit over the years it used to be that you could get a 200 Series 300 series 400 series 500 series all the way up through all the numbers these days at least from what I'm seeing currently Dell has uh you know there's a 200 there's a 250 which is what I got for the open sense server there's in the new 16th generation it's the 300 series and then you've got the the 600s 700s eight and NES um there are some model numbers that are four digits instead of three I think those are all AMD so I don't know entirely how to interpret them I haven't worked with them as much the second digit I just mentioned 16th generation the second digit of the model number will tell you what generation the server is um plus 10 so when it's an r250 okay you know it's an entry-level server because it's a 200 series the second number being five means it's 15th generation and if I'm specking an R 660 it's a 600 series server that is the high end of mid tier and then the six means that 16th generation which is brand new at this point the last digit for a three-digit server number anyway if it's zero it is an Intel processor if it is a five it is an AMD processor that's just how Dell has decided to work their model numbers and again there are four-digit model numbers but I'm pretty sure they all end in five that's why I'm pretty sure they're all AMD servers and I'm not sure what the fourth digit is for in the in the third place so okay I'd have to research that and uh get back to there's also some additional letters following some of these models and that is something that took me a little bit of time to understand what they were because I'm like okay what's the difference between a 760 XA versus a 760 versus a 760 XS versus a 760 xd2 what is this so let's break this down for you Dell actually has documentation on this uh and I will put the links in the description so that you can check it out and read more on it later if you want um the XA model starting with that and I'm going to just generalize for a second here and say that the X should be thought of as extra in all of these cases but then the second letter will tell you a little bit more about what it's extra at for XA you can think of this as either extra AI or extra acceleration and in this case we're talking about GPU acceleration the XA variants are designed to hold more graphics cards and have be able to handle more of those GPU heavy loads such as machine learning AI rendering Etc then they have the standard variant with no letters this is just supposed to be about flexibility it can do a lot of things it doesn't focus in any one area it's a generalist okay XS is extra scalable you could also think of it as extra small but but I think that does the XS models a bit of a disservice they're not small they're focused on scalability because this is what is designed for a lot of virtualization virtualization workloads tend to require a different balance of CPU to memory in terms of ratio so for scalable workloads where you're dealing with stuff that is very heavily virtualized the excess line is probably your way to go then you have the xd2 line there used to just be an XD but now it's xd2 okay inflation I guess um and in this case you can think of it as extra density or extra disc the XD models are very very very heavily storage focused they might have 24 drives in front and another 24 drives behind in an extra foldout shelf in the middle of the server lots of discs I would not spec an XD server I would rather probably spec a Nas but they make it available and there's no denying it can handle the extra disload so okay fine that's that's a thing that they have cool so when you're selecting a server for a particular client or for a particular use case it's very important that you know what is the server intended to be used for because that is going to determine what tier are we looking at are we looking for just a little web server or a router or are we looking for something that can handle 10 virtual machines and needs boatloads of RAM and CPU and everything else is it going to be virtualization heavy is it going to be needing to run realtime databases in which case the standard model might have the flexibility that you're looking for are we going to be using any sort of Graphics acceleration do we need an XA variant so the exact model that you're looking for is going to depend very heavily on what you want to do with it now other details as we go through this CPUs your CPUs are going to require possibly a little extra looking up cuz you'll often just get a list of here's a bunch of model numbers of CPU and you go well what makes this different than any of these other ones okay so if you open up Google Google being your friend if you type in Intel Arc as an ark and then look up the model number you will get the Intel Arc page for that the ark is their Archive of all of their CPU specs and it can be a very useful thing to look at CU you'll get details on what Advanced features the CPU supports what how much memory it can handle of what type it can handle at what speed it can handle it and a lot of this if you're going through a you know product selector at least for Dell Lenovo never really had one of these that worked in the way that Dells did I'll DeTour for just a second here Lenovo servers certainly when I was specking Lenovo servers were just order a chassis and then order a bunch of parts and it's up to you to determine whether those parts work together or not this was arduous this was very arduous there were multiple times when I ordered the raid card I wanted only to find out that I had ordered it in the wrong form factor and it wouldn't fit in the server fine it it's a way of doing it everything was off the shelf they're okay fine Dell's uh server Builder is a lot more integrated and they will custom build the server to the specs that you put in and I'll show you that next week but it's still important sometimes to be able to know that yes this CPU can do this level of performance even though Dell's server Builder is a lot more integrated and it in most cases will not let you spec something that cannot be assembled ah and one of the points that you can look up on the arc for these CPUs is memory and this is important because one of your next crucial points to consider is how much RAM you're going to put in and in what quantities Ram will come in sticks of 8 gig 16 gig 32 gig 64 gig sticks and you need to sort out how many sticks you're going to give each CPU now rule number one very important each CPU must have the same amount of r Ram this is just the way that things are it is a requirement it doesn't work if you provision the CPUs with different amounts of ram it just doesn't so if you have a one CPU server obviously you don't need to worry about this but if you have a 2cpu server or a 4 CPU server you need to make sure that what you decide to put in the server can be evenly split between the CPUs or else it's not going to work you also need to consider memory interleaving what is this well it's not something that even most of the people that I work with are aware of generally speaking memory interleaving is a technology that is used in pretty much all CPUs at the moment that I can tell anyway um which in order to speed up memory access access if you say hey I want everything from 1 to 20 it'll split this up you say here's a here's a contiguous area of memory and you'll say okay one will go to memory stick a two will go to memory stick B three will go to memory stick C and then when I say I want everything from here it can pull from multiple RAM chips simultaneously rather than having to wait for for one chip to provide all the data and this speeds it up if you're going to make memory interleaving work successfully you need the CPU to be able to say I'm addressing all of these channels all at once channels is a word you may have heard before because that is something that we have seen in desktop PCS dual Channel or even Tri Channel systems and then you can get RAM for your gaming system that is in packs of two for a dual Channel system or when Tri channel was a thing you could get them in packs of three and it was designed that you would have one stick per Channel and then sometimes you could get a second set if you had four slots total or six slots total and each channel would have a maximum of two slots available to it servers work pretty much the same way but there are a lot more channels to consider for the current uh Intel Zeon processor line which is what you find in servers first and second generation had lesser number of memory channels available I think for the second generation it was six memory channels available starting with the third generation and we're now on the fifth generation it's eight m memory channels per CPU and each channel has two slots so each CPU can take up to 16 sticks of ram at like 64 gigs each so you can fill these servers with boatloads of ram if you have the money for it and if you have the need for it not many of my customers do but that's okay the capabil is there in the hardware but memory interleaving means that there are particular configurations which are better for the CPU than others if you have a CPU that has eight memory channels and you fill three of them that's that's not good it's it it has to work with a disjointed number of channels meaning it's going to try and address three channels and then have to skip over five it's just not as performant so there are some guidelines for how many sticks of ram you want to have in for each CPU a balanced configuration is the best and that means that you have all memory controllers working with the same amount of ram per CPU that means you're if you have eight memory channels and you have two slots per memory channel that means that for a balanced configuration you want either eight or 16 sticks of ram per CPU and that is optimal eight sticks of ram per CPU gives you the highest performance 16 sticks of ram gives you very good performance but the greatest capacity okay pretty basic basic then you can have near balanced configurations a near balanced configuration is nearly balanced you basically go with starting at half of your memory controllers are full and you can have half or 3/4 of the memory controllers full because then it's got at least 50% of the controllers with something and you actually want to space it out and use the slots in such a way that it can evenly go you know use one Skip One use one Skip One use one skip one that's easy to mask off or you know use three Skip One use three Skip One something to that effect these more complex configurations Dell has already done the slot numbering on their motherboard so that you can just fill them basically from 1 to four and it'll take care of that for you it'll it'll skip the ones that it's supposed to skip and it'll fill the ones that it's supposed to fill but for a near balanced configuration you need four or six or 12 or 14 sticks of ram so for optimal eight or 16 for nearly optimal four or six 12 or 14 two is not on there 10 is not on there neither are any odd numbered configurations like seven sticks of ram per CPU that is going to hang the CPU up pretty badly it'll run don't get me wrong it will run but it will not run well so when you're sizing the amount of ram you need in a server it's not just about how do I actually get a number of sticks of ram to do this you could say I want a 64 gig stick and a 32 gig stick and that's 96 gigs of RAM okay cool but even in a oneu server that's not going to be optimal because that's only two sticks of RAM and your CPU has eight memory channels available so so you need to break it down further and go okay so if I want 96 gigs of RAM I can do this as six sticks of 16 GB and that's a nearly balanced configuration that is optimal you could also do it as 12 8 gig sticks but you know that uh depending on what ranking it was and all the rest there's lots of other details to consider on RAM alone plus all the other bits and pieces but this gives you an idea of some of the um things that a system administrator or a network administrator has to keep in mind when they're building a server and this is true for all servers that run everything Amazon runs on web servers Office 365 runs on web servers eBay runs on web servers data bases that Walmart uses to track products moving around they all run on servers too the government runs on servers big business runs on servers nonprofits run on servers everything computerized runs on servers and so building these requires a decent amount of knowledge anybody can build something and have it work after a fashion fion but if you want it to run well there's a lot more to dig into this video has gone on long enough as I've prattled on but for now this just gives you insight into the basics next week I will actually open up the system builder for uh dell server um using the Dell partner website because that has a lot more options than the standard consumer version of their website and so we'll be able to see all of the hardware options that you can specify so that you get a good idea of what it looks like when you're actually building this server but that's for next week so for now I hope that you found that interesting I am your next door nedman thanks for joining me

Channel: NextDoorNetAdmin

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Id: XFgX5njI6Ls

Length: 28min 55sec (1735 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2024