# Best blade server for running high performance FreeBSD



## ekool (Jan 19, 2011)

I'm in the market for a new blade server and have no brand loyalties. I'm looking for the best (well supported) blade server for FreeBSD -- I'm curious what everyone's thoughts are out there.

I'd prefer to stick with one of the better well known companies (IBM, HP, Sun, Dell, etc)

Anyone have any recommendations?


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## tajudd (Jan 28, 2011)

ekool said:
			
		

> I'm in the market for a new blade server and have no brand loyalties. I'm looking for the best (well supported) blade server for FreeBSD -- I'm curious what everyone's thoughts are out there.
> 
> I'd prefer to stick with one of the better well known companies (IBM, HP, Sun, Dell, etc)
> 
> Anyone have any recommendations?



No personal experience with either of the following mentions.
I have always enjoyed IBM hardware with OSS software.  Seems very well mixed.  (iXsystems comes to mind too, but they're pretty spendy)

I work for HP, and you have to run pretty bleeding-edge to get compatible hardware.  HBAs for example was just recently added to 9.0 stable.


If I were to pick of any of the above:
  IBM for brand name
  iXsystems for comatibility
  HP for my employee discount.


HTH


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## danbi (Jan 28, 2011)

How about an not-so-unique brand like Supermicro?


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## tajudd (Jan 28, 2011)

danbi said:
			
		

> How about an not-so-unique brand like Supermicro?



Supermicro is hit-n-miss from the Googling I've done.  iXsystems use only supermicro, but supermicro is a form factor that is nonstandard.  That means that if you buy a supermicro motherboard, you need a supermicro enclosure/case.

You should have better success than what Google gives you given code maturity and active development, but there is a chance you'll hit a lemon.


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## danbi (Jan 29, 2011)

This world is not going to survive if everybody trusts what Google finds 

There is nothing wrong with the Supermicro blades. All blades, from all manufacturers are proprietary -- if you buy IBM blades, you buy IBM enclosures etc.

In all cases, you need to check the specifications of the blade processors for support. With the example Supermicro, where I have researched recently for a new system build, their current blades have either and Intel disk controller, or an AMD disk controller, or an LSISAS2008 SAS controller (for blade models with more disks). There is perfect support for the Intel/AMD SATA controllers. There is currently no support for this SAS controller in 8-stable (FreeBSD up to 8.2). There is however support in FreeBSD 9 --- one could expect it will merge to 8-stable after 8.2 is released. Slightly older models of the blades have the LSISAS1068E SAS controller. All blades feature integrated dual Gigabit controllers from Intel, that too, have very good support in FreeBSD. Some blades can have Infiniband/10Gbit Ethernet controler as well. The 10Gbit part is too, supported by FreeBSD, Infiniband is not. But then, FreeBSD does not yet support Infiniband in any platform. What else is there in the blade? CPU, RAM... these are obviously supported by FreeBSD. The chasis itself has nothing to do with the operating system.

I would expect the same for the blade systems supplied by IBM, HP etc.

You ask about performance, but what about price? Supermicro 4xCPU AMD blade, with 4x2.5" drives costs around $1000 (blade only, no CPU and RAM).
This gives you up to 48 CPU cores in one blade. You may have up to 10 such blades in 7" chasis.


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## ProServ (Mar 8, 2011)

*Blade Servers with FreeBSD Support*

I am biased but for a good reason. We build them. They are *rock solid*. And you won't have any trouble installing or running FreeBSD on them. They are designed for virtualization support and you can do LUN copying, and other crucial backps. You can make hot-spare Servers .... Take a look at http://www.servaris.com/blade_servers.php.


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