Repair DL360 G6 or Whitebox. Need a refresher on ESXI

[poot]

So I picked up a working DL360 off Craigslist. My meaning of working must be different...So I have a single 6 core Xeon with ~30gb of ram and 2 460w PSUs. I have no other enterprise equipment to swap out and test this thing. It will spin up the fans and then just sit, no post, no video at all. I tried messing with different combos of ram and the most I can get it to do is spin up the fans and then make a long beep. Only thing I found wrong was a small dab of thermal paste on the a couple cpu contacts. Maybe it fried? I let it idle for a few minutes and the cpu itself was not hot, maybe luke warm at best. Do these stay that cool?

Should I take a gamble on the cpu or anyone have a better guess? Otherwise it looks like barebones G6s go for around ~100 on ebay or a AMD combo at Microcenter for ~150 with iommu support.


I have no long term plans for this except to go through and create a few machines and take a look at the newer options in ESXI.

 

[sybreeder]

I've got couple DL360 G5 and those are so loud that i don't use it...I've got my own whitebox with i5 28gb ram and it's quiet and power efficient. That's why i'd go into whitebox route.
The only plus for G6 would be ILO and testing how that work...
Anyway is there any errors during boot in your G6 ? there should be something like a diagnostic LED panel - at least it's on my G5.
Maybe memory is set in the wrong order... or something.
Try to unplug everything. Make sure that socket is ok and there is no bend pins. Maybe that's the problem...
Or some cable are loose.
Oh and one more thing. During startup is fans spinning in max speed at all time or after a minute or two are slowing down ?

 

[SilentDecode]

A long beep should tell an sysadmin that it's dead.. Well.. If you can pry out the paste, you can MAYBE revive it. I should give it a try.

You can buy a barebone G6 or maybe a G7, because those servers are on hardware basis, mostly interchangeable.
G7's can fit more RAM (384GB instead of 288GB), faster CPU's (with more cores/threads), more expansion and are as a barebone just a tad more expensive, but that's not something bad. But you can upgrade your CPU's after a certain time and throw in some X or E56xx CPU's. The G6 doesn't support those.

E or X55xx = First gen Xeon (Based of the i7 line)
E or X56xx = Second gen Xeon(Based of the i7 line)