Wife says DL360 G7 is too loud

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Modder man

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My current Lab Esxi host is a Dl360 G7 with 76GB of ram and 2x L5640. Running local storage with 15K drivers for right now. I think I will likely be replacing it with a Supermicro 4U box as that will kill two birds with one stone. Jumping up to a 4U chassis also allows me to roll my NAS into the same box and just run all of my equipment out of one box. From a value standpoint I am unsure if I should look for something socket 2011 or look for another server running dual L5640. In real world usage would I see any power saving with Dual E5's? which models would I want to look for? it looks like dual L5640 would run about ~600 so that is kinda my starting point. If E5's bring enough value to the table I am ok with spending more.
 
Modder man said:
Running local storage with 15K drivers for right now. I think I will likely be replacing it with a Supermicro 4U box as that will kill two birds with one stone.
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Sorry I don't mean to laugh but your wife will hate you from the noise that a SuperMicro 4U will kick out.

Not unless you are going with their 4U pedestals. Is that what you are doing? If so then yeah you'll be able to do that and things will be a whole lot quieter.
 
How can a 4u chassis be louder....assuming reasonable fans are used. 120mm fans can be used correct?
 
Depends on the fans and what is going on. I got a used dell R905 off ebay. The stock nidec fans were horrible. I replaced them with drop-in delta units, and the noise went *way* down. Also, depending on the load and whatever, the BMC could spin the fans up to the point it is annoying...
 
You could always build a sound deadening cabinet. Should be a lot cheaper than replacing the server.
 
Modder man said:
How can a 4u chassis be louder....assuming reasonable fans are used. 120mm fans can be used correct?
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Server cases are meant for industrialized environments and also need to be designed to handle more than one power envelope. So the fans are typically heavy duty and quite loud. Now you can control them somewhat using the MB but even on the lowest setting it's easily audible. Most people switch them out.

Someone earlier recommended going with a sound proof rack. That's actually not that hard to do and actually cheaper than a SM case.
 
Be Careful with those 15k drives, i had issues where my 10Ks would overheat in the chassis, make sure there is significant airflow in that chassis or your noise concerns will become bigger concerns on your data side...

I had a Norco 4224 that caused the above, just an FYI
 
Are the disks in the server HP disks? One of my co workers had a problem with his dl380 g6 at home. When he had non HP disks in it, the fans spun up to ~76%, he said it was very loud. I guess the ilo is looking for a sensor on the disks that is not there.

I also found on my own hp dl360 g6 that pci-e add on cards can cause the fans to spin up a bit. When i added a 2 port nic, the fans ran in the mid 40s rather then the normal 22% with no add on cards. At 22% i found it to be one of the quietest things in the rack.
 
yeah the server is very quiet if the fans stay spun down at %25. Right now that machine is running using about 18GHz of compute, apparently that load on the CPU's pushes fans up to %45 which is just a touch too loud.
 
Can you move the rack to somewhere where the noise will be tolerable?
 
We live in an apartment which is the biggest part of the problem. We just have one office that we share.
 
The 4U supermicros can be quiet but you need to replace the fans.
 
How many disks are you using?

SM has super quite workstation chassis that can hold 8 3.5" SAS/SATA disks, I have one and it's very quiet. It supports EATX motherboard if you need.

You can also replace 4U SM chassis PSU with super quiet one too. I have replaced the 2 stock PSUs in my 4U SM storage chassis and it's fairly quiet as well.
 
A 4U SMC box is going to absolutely be loud. Note that during initial power on all fans will run at max speed and then cool down once the IPMI and BMC have booted.

You could do several things to mitigate the noise however.
1) replace the industrial fans with 3rd party fans. The stock fans are designed to deal with much larger load than your proposing.
2) dump the 15K drives and replace with 5400RPM SATA or NAS SMS drives. You'll get much lower heat and vibration meaning you'll need to move even less air with the above fans.
3) if you really need more IO performance than the slower disks can provide add some SSDs for read ahead cache. Be very careful if you want write cache though as a sudden power loss can result in data loss without the correct components

One of the advantages of moving to a 4U is you may have room to move to a AIO watercooler for the CPU rather than relying on the passive fun design required in nearly all 1 and 2U systems.
 
From a strictly raw cpu performance standpoint a single e5-1650v3 will give you around the same performance as the dual L5640's, you could then move to ddr4 16gb(or even 32gb) ecc reg dimms x4 and an asus ASUS X99-M WS. (~$1350) You could then switch to an aio cooler or something like a Darkrock Pro 3, and get a pretty quiet build. As far as the hdds you would need a good controller and good cooling, or you could move to quieter drives depending on your io requirements.

As far as fans and making the unit quiet, I am not sure there is much you can do with the 40mm beasts in a 1u chassis. You might however look at a bios update to see if you can find a lower acoustics mode or quiet mode. We have a couple of these at work and I do not remember them being particularly loud, but they are setup with single 5450's and minimal drives, so I am sure they are not putting out the same kind of heat loads.
 
I find it hard to believe it's that loud. I own a DL360 G6 myself and it's quite quiet (much more than my DL380 G3's I used to have). I've also worked with DL380 G7's and G8's and they've always run quite quiet.
 
It Really is pretty quiet. I dont think it is loud but the boss has spoken. I am trying to make it as quiet as possible. Its not so bad at idle but at more than ~25% cpu usage the fans spin up quite a bit.
 
Gone through something similar myself. Quiet-ish 1U server to a super quiet 4U Supermicro server to make the wife happy!

So long as you purchase a SuperQuiet 4U Supermicro server you WILL have a whisper quiet system. It'll be inaudible.

The one I specced has 4x 10k SAS drives, 4x hot swap super quiet (green fans), a single 92mm super quiet exhaust fan and Supermicro's SuperQuiet power supply. In addition it's got dual 6 core Xeons with 96GB of RAM. So not too slow.

I had Supermicro's local distributor spec it for me so they provided these fantastic Supermicro heatpipe coolers which are like 6" tall and bolt through the board into the chassis so it's solid. The chassis even converts from Rackmount to Pedestal which means I can always shove it under my desk if I get rid of the rack.

Couldn't be happier with it.
 
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