Category: Hardware

[sc:hardware-category ]I recently upgraded the memory in my servers and now it’s time to upgrade the data volumes as well.

When I built the servers, I invested in 2tb hard drives for the data volumes and used DFSR to replicate the data between the servers.  This ensured I had multiple copies of the data and protected against hardware failure in a single server.

I had a close call a few years ago when my single server’s power supply decided to die.  Luckily it was a nice quite death and it didn’t take the motherboard or drives out with it, but it certainly was at the front of my mind when I built the new twin servers to replace it.

I was down to about 150GB of space left on the 2TB drives and so it was time to replace them with something larger (I could have just added another drive, but I’m already at capacity for the SATA ports on the MB so it was just easier to replace it).  The new drive I chose was the Segate Green 6tb drive.

My DFS servers are VM’s and since I am dedicating the entire drive to them I directly connected the 2tb drives to the VM instead of having the overhead of creating a VMDK on them.  I wasn’t sure what would happen when I just swapped out the drives so I decided to play it safe.

First I shutdown the first DFS VM, then I removed the old drive and disabled networking on it.

I then powered down the VM host, swapped the drives and restarted the host.

Once it was powered back up, I took the new drive offline, added it to the VM and restarted the VM without any network connection.

Once up, I connected to the VM, created a new partition on the drive, gave it the same drive letter and then created the basic folder structure the old drive had.  Windows still knew about the shares and they became available as soon as I had created the folders for them.

I then brought the server back on to the network and waited to see if replication would start.

That turns out to have been a little too optimistic 🙂

DFSR relies on information contained in the “System Volume Information” (SVI)directory on the disk, which of course was missing on the new drive.  DFSR interprets that to mean that it hasn’t communicated with the server in a long time and refuses to replicate with it.

My first instinct was to remove the server from the replication group and then add it back in, making sure to force an AD poll with dfsrdiag.exe.  But that didn’t seem to work, I found some reference articles talking about deleting some of the information in the SVI directory but that seemed risky.

I decided to simply delete the replication groups and then re-create them, again forcing an AD poll.

After a few minutes, replication restarted and files began to appear on the new drive.  Of course replicating 2tb of data takes a while and DFSR isn’t the fastest, but it does work and after a few days everything was back in place.

Of course, I then had to do the same thing on the second server but that went smoothly and both servers now have their new 6tb data volumes.

[sc:hardware-category ]Back on Cyber Monday, the Microsoft Store had a sale on the Dell P2815Q 4k display and I decided to pick one up.

I’d been looking for a 4k monitor and at $299 for the 28″ Dell it was hard to argue with the price.  It arrive a few days later and unpacking it was easy enough.  It comes with a stand, power cord and DisplayPort cable.

The first thing I did was plug it in to my existing desktop PC using my existing HDMI cable.  It has an older video card in it (no display port on it) and I didn’t expect it to be able to support the 4k resolution of the monitor but I did expect it to do something.  Unfortunately while I could access the on-screen controls for the monitor, it stubbornly refused to display my desktop 🙁

My first thought was just that the video card couldn’t match the monitor and so I grabbed my laptop and plugged it in.  Same thing.

Of course my next thought was a dead display, but that seemed unlikely so I too a gamble and swapped out my HDMI cable (which still works fine with my old HD monitor) and suddenly I had video!

Video at 1920×1200 of course as that was all my old video card could handle.  A quick trip to the local computer shop and I was the proud owner of a AMD R7 250 card with DisplayPort.  I swapped the card, plugged in the cable suddenly had nothing on the display again!

It turns out the Dell doesn’t support auto detection of the input type and I had to manually change the setting.  Not a big deal, but kind of a strange oversight.

After installing the new video card drivers  I had a full 4k display up and running.

The monitor itself is a stylish affair, the main body is very dark grey with four physical buttons along the bottom right side.  The base stand is light grey and support rotating the monitor from landscape to portrait mode.

I have to admit I REALLY like my old Samsung monitor’s 16×10 aspect ratio, 16:9 just seems to wide, but it does have some advantages when you have multiple documents or websites up at the same time.  I think I’ll get use to it in time.

Of course, fitting 4 times the resolution of my old monitor in to something only ~20% bigger makes all those pixels a lot smaller.  Windows does support 4k, but not very well.  The scaling works ok, but not perfectly so I’ve set the scaling to 125% which seems to be the best compromise at the moment.  Hopefully Windows 10 will have better support for 4k next year.

The color saturation is a little pale and I’m still playing with the settings.  The default’s are terrible like most monitors and are designed to show off the display in a brightly lite store.

Overall I think it’s a little early for most people to adopt a 4k monitor, but I’ll stick with it for a while and the extra resolution is very nice 🙂

[sc:hardware-category ]Back when I built my new VM host servers I installed 16g of ram which has severed me well for the last couple of years.  However over the last few months it’s started to get a little tight so it was time to upgrade.

The ASUS KCMA-D8 motherboards have 8 slots for DIMM’s on them and the 16g I originally populated them with were 4g sticks so I went online to find what my options were.

I had used Kingston memory on the original install and I’ve had good look with it in the past so I found a 32g kit (KVR16LR11S4K/32) and ordered it.

It has 4 8g DIMMs in it so I pulled the 16g out of one server and put it in the second one and installed the new 32g kit in it.  This gave both servers 32g of RAM.

I considered going to 64g, but I suspect by the time I need that much ram it will be time to replace the servers (they’re already 3 years old).

I did look at upgrading the CPU’s at the same time, the KCMA-D8 supports a variety of newer CPU’s IF you have the right production date on the MB.  Unfortunately my MB’s don’t support anything newer than the CPU’s I have so no CPU upgrade this time.

It looks like I’ll have to do some hard disk upgrades soon as well, disk space is getting tight on the VM OS disks and I’m getting close to capacity on my data drives as well.