Dell Server Power Use

Danny862 · 25 Oct 2013 at 15:15

Hi,

I have a Dell PowerEdge 1950 II (I know, slightly old)

Its not the standard one, but has two Intel Xeon L5310 Low Voltage CPU's instead of the 80/120W CPU's they often have.

It also has two Seagate Barracuda LP 500GB drives in it, running in RAID 1.

And 8 full slots of DDR2.

The system is an ESXi test server, has all sorts of stuff on it, sometimes nothing, sometimes 5-6 VM's

Here are my questions:

How many Watts do you think this would use?

How would this compare to an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ with 2 standard 7200rpm drives?

What else could I do to reduce power consumption?

Thanks in advanced for your help!

leigh_boy · 25 Oct 2013 at 15:26

i dont think esxi works on athlons, but only on there server processor, opteron isit? i have seem it work on a sempron am2.
ermmm are you runing it on 2x PSUs?
i wouldnt want to run more then 2 or 3 vms on the amd processor

LizardKing · 25 Oct 2013 at 16:13

HP do a nice power usage calculator, might be worth finding a similar spec HP and comparing.

AndrewP · 25 Oct 2013 at 16:51

http://www.dell.com/html/us/products/rack_advisor_new/

Lanz · 25 Oct 2013 at 17:37

Buy yourself a little plug watt monitor, its hard to get the real output of servers by just looking at the server specs or using the rack advisor.

I had an esxi test box using a Athlon 64 X2, its quite crap for doing any proper stuff, VM's run slow.... only useful for learning esxi shell type stuff.

Dogers · 25 Oct 2013 at 20:34

Lanz said:
Buy yourself a little plug watt monitor, its hard to get the real output of servers by just looking at the server specs or using the rack advisor.

Or two, as any decent server has two PSUs

Danny862 · 26 Oct 2013 at 11:24

Lanz said:
Buy yourself a little plug watt monitor, its hard to get the real output of servers by just looking at the server specs or using the rack advisor.

I had an esxi test box using a Athlon 64 X2, its quite crap for doing any proper stuff, VM's run slow.... only useful for learning esxi shell type stuff.

I will look into this! Maybe a local hardware store will have one?

The server is slow! Running Server08r2, WHS and Ubuntu... It drags along.

The Dell server does have 2 slots for PSU's, but it only has 1 installed because i really don't need redundancy for a home server.

Dogers · 26 Oct 2013 at 15:28

Drag along how? The drives you've got are very slow, apparently running at a slothlike 5900 RPM which could well be your issue.

Caged · 28 Oct 2013 at 14:18

Slightly old? Also that thing must be crazy loud.

I don't know what sort of performance monitoring the free version of ESXi has (assuming you're on the free version and not vCenter), but that will tell you why you're slow. See what your disk is doing, and check for dual-core VMs that really don't need to be dual core (most of the time it's not necessary).

Yamahahahahaha · 28 Oct 2013 at 15:45

Caged said:
Slightly old? Also that thing must be crazy loud.

The fans in a PE1950 run upwards of 8000rpm, and there's 16 of them (4 banks in dual push-pull configuration). They are very loud.