Why I hate Blade servers

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on November 30th 2008 - Listed in Hardware Personal

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In the past week I've been fighting 4 days with a HP blade server and there is no end of the story yet. I've never liked the whole Blade idea, don't ask me why, I don't know it. But last week I got the confirmation to not like Blade systems. What happened?

First there was a server crash. A Blade server had a malfunction and shut down. The power LED turned to red. So I called the support and instead of coming to us and repairing the server they wanted us to make a test with another enclosure.
The next day the tech guy came and confirmed that there is a problem with the affected blade server. He took the server with him to replace the motherboard and left.

The next day another tech guy comes by and we slide the blade server into the enclosure - nothing happens. Oh! Now there is a problem with the enclosure! I got told we should reboot the whole enclosure - That means to shut down all the other blade servers as well.

Before we do that I decided to try to power up the blade server in another enclosure. The blade server powers automatically up in the other enclosure after like 15 seconds. Well, he almost powers up. The power and nic LED's are green, the disk LED stays inactive. Obviously, so I got told, there is a problem with the motherboard (again!) and a processor.

After 4 days of work we have now still 2 problems: The blade server is still down PLUS one enclosure is indicating a "Fault". Call me old-fashioned but I prefer the original use of a server with one purpose. You can still build a cluster between two different servers. If server #1 crashes, you still have server #2 in that case. But if you have a problem with the enclosure in a blade system, you risk to power off all your blade servers in it.

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