"Mudkip [...] is a Water-type Pokémon introduced in Generation III" - [[https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mudkip_(Pok%C3%A9mon)]]
UCC has a theme for naming servers in the machine room after sea creatures starting with M. I decided to have a bit of fun with this and name the two HP servers after Pokemon that are also sea creatures starting with M.

How/where the machine was obtained

Mudkip was donated by Dylan Hicks [333] along with Magikarp to UCC on 8/07/2019, and a rail kit was later purchased and donated on 5/08/2019.

History prior to arriving to UCC

This machine was previously used as a VM host at a remote minesite at a gold mining company, and was running VMWare ESXi from an SD card, with a separate SAN used for VM storage. As such, there is still some red dust inside, so it probably needs a good clean with some compressed air.

UCC machine history

  • 08/07/2019: Donated and installed in the machine room using spare shelf rails and bolts from "Screw DB"
  • 27/07/2019: A spare 500GB WD Blue disk installed from the machine room, as the only decent spare SAS disks we had were put into Magikarp instead

  • 05/08/2019: Re-racked with a proper rail kit
  • ??/??/2019: RAM between Magikarp and Mudkip redistributed so they both have 128GiB each

  • 25/11/2019: Mudkip finally added to our Proxmox cluster, albeit with SSH key issues, which was preventing VM migrations among other things
  • 23/01/2020: SSH keys finally fixed, making Mudkip now useful on the cluster
  • 17/04/2020: James [MPT] replaced the faulty fans in Magikarp and Mudkip with new ones

Current machine tasks

  • Hosts VMs on our VM cluster ("atlantic")

Current software configuration

  • Running Proxmox Virtualisation Environment 5.4 (as of 23/04/2020), which under the hood consists of Debian, KVM, Qemu, LXC and a bunch of other FOSS projects

Current hardware configuration

  • HP Proliant DL360p Gen8 1RU server
  • Dual CPU sockets, each with a 8C/16T 2.9GHz Intel Xeon E5-2690 (gen 1)
  • 128GiB of DDR3 ECC RDIMMs for RAM (8GiB per stick)
  • Quad-port Intel 82580 Gigabit Ethernet
  • Dual port Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM57810 10Gigabit Ethernet

  • Dual port FibreChannel

  • 32GB SD card for Proxmox itself to boot/run off
  • A single 500GB WD Blue for local storage - don't put anything important on it!
  • Remote management via HP iLO 4 (with HTML5 KVM console). See sftp://ssh.ucc.asn.au/home/wheel/docs/RemoteManagement.org for details

Future plans for the machine

  • To hopefully not have any more fans fail!
  • To keep hosting VMs

Thanks to:

  • Dylan Hicks [333] for donating Mudkip and the rails, and purchasing replacement fans (which UCC reimbursed) ...it feels weird writing a wiki page thanking myself!
  • James Arcus [MPT] for playing musical fans between Magikarp and Mudkip to keep Magikarp going at Mudkip's expense (several times over the course of several months), and for installing the new fans when they arrived whilst Cameron Hall was in COVID-19 lockdown!

  • Magikarp for stealing all my good fans and forcing me to be switched off for a while!


CategoryMachines