Accessing the RAID setup on an HP Proliant DL380 G7

When the HP Proliant DL380 G7 boots up the only displayed BIOS options are F9 for Setup, F11 for the boot disk menu, but neither other these take you to the RAID setup. To get to the RAID setup options, when the screen appears showing the F9 and F11 options press F8 every second or so, and you’ll first get the ILO configuration. Exit ILO, and next you’ll get the RAID configuration options. I found this tip mentioned in this post on the HP forums here.

My DL380 G7 has the HP R410i RAID controller card. Here’s step by step getting to the RAID settings:

First from the ILO settings, Exit from the File menu:

After exiting ILO you get the RAID controller options – press F8 for the Arrays Utility:

Now in RAID settings, create your Logical Drive from your available physical drives:

Here I have added 2 500GB drives to a RAID 1+0 array:

Loading the Yelp dataset into MongoDB

In a previous post, I downloaded the Yelp dataset, 5.79GB of json data. My first thought (before I get to experimenting with Apache Spark), was how can I extract some basic stats from this dataset, basics like how many data items are there, and what do the records look like in each of the data files.

Using mongoimport and referring to the docs here, the syntax for the import is:

mongoimport -d database -c collection importfile.json

Here’s the Yelp dataset json file for importing, to get an idea of the size of each file:

kev@esxi-ubuntu-mongodb1:~/data/yelp$ ls -lS

total 5657960

-rwxrwxr-x 1 kev kev 3819730722 Oct 14 16:16 review.json

-rwxrwxr-x 1 kev kev 1572537048 Oct 14 16:22 user.json

-rwxrwxr-x 1 kev kev  184892583 Oct 14 16:16 tip.json

-rwxrwxr-x 1 kev kev  132272455 Oct 14 16:03 business.json

-rwxrwxr-x 1 kev kev   60098185 Oct 14 16:03 checkin.json

-rwxrwxr-x 1 kev kev   24195971 Oct 14 16:03 photos.json

 

So importing each of the datasets, one at a time:

kev@esxi-ubuntu-mongodb1:~/data/yelp$ mongoimport -d yelp -c checkin checkin.json

2017-10-14T16:49:35.566-0700 connected to: localhost

2017-10-14T16:49:38.564-0700 [#########……………] yelp.checkin 22.6MB/57.3MB (39.5%)

2017-10-14T16:49:44.474-0700 [########################] yelp.checkin 57.3MB/57.3MB (100.0%)

2017-10-14T16:49:44.475-0700 imported 135148 documents

 

kev@esxi-ubuntu-mongodb1:~/data/yelp$ mongoimport -d yelp -c business business.json

2017-10-14T16:49:59.593-0700 connected to: localhost

2017-10-14T16:50:02.592-0700 [#####……………….] yelp.business 27.9MB/126MB (22.1%)

2017-10-14T16:50:12.873-0700 [########################] yelp.business 126MB/126MB (100.0%)

2017-10-14T16:50:12.873-0700 imported 156639 documents

 

kev@esxi-ubuntu-mongodb1:~/data/yelp$ mongoimport -d yelp -c tip tip.json

2017-10-14T16:50:38.061-0700 connected to: localhost

2017-10-14T16:50:41.058-0700 [##………………….] yelp.tip 17.5MB/176MB (9.9%)

2017-10-14T16:51:07.381-0700 [########################] yelp.tip 176MB/176MB (100.0%)

2017-10-14T16:51:07.381-0700 imported 1028802 documents

 

kev@esxi-ubuntu-mongodb1:~/data/yelp$ mongoimport -d yelp -c user user.json

2017-10-14T16:51:28.648-0700 connected to: localhost

2017-10-14T16:51:31.648-0700 [……………………] yelp.user 36.9MB/1.46GB (2.5%)

2017-10-14T16:54:15.907-0700 [########################] yelp.user 1.46GB/1.46GB (100.0%)

2017-10-14T16:54:15.907-0700 imported 1183362 documents

 

kev@esxi-ubuntu-mongodb1:~/data/yelp$ mongoimport -d yelp -c review review.json

2017-10-14T16:57:01.018-0700 connected to: localhost

2017-10-14T16:57:04.016-0700 [……………………] yelp.review 34.9MB/3.56GB (1.0%)

2017-10-14T17:02:31.967-0700 [########################] yelp.review 3.56GB/3.56GB (100.0%)

2017-10-14T17:02:31.967-0700 imported 4736897 documents

 

Done! Almost 6GB of data imported to MongoDB. Now, time for some queries!

All disks are not equal, especially cheap consumer disks without temperature sensors (a.k.a HP DL380 G7 fan speeds running like a 747 on take off)

I’ve recently been enjoying the freedom of a homelab, creating VMs on VMware ESXi and installing all-the-things. I’ve had my HP Proliant DL380 G7 for a couple of weeks now and already accumulated a number of VMs for investigating a collection of things:

Prior to my DL380 arriving, I was pondering what type of disks to put in, and in particular whether I used go with cheap consumer laptop hard disks, more expensive (e.g. WD Red NAS disks), or named-brand HP disks. I went with a pair of HGST 500GB disks to start with, and ran into an issue with the cooling fans spinning up like a 747 taking off.  Googling for “dl380 disk fans” turns up many related posts, and it turns out that some non-HP drives in Proliant servers may not report their internal temperature correctly, resulting in the server thinking the drives are overheating, and cranking up the fans to compensate.

Here’s a couple of screenshots (from the iLO – Integrated Lights Out) showing the fans ramping up to near unbearable noise levels over about 5 minutes:

  • iLO reporting the drives overheating:

  • Only after a couple of mins, but still running faster than probably should be at idle:

  • Starting to ramp up:
  • Getting unbearable now:

If I’d spent some more time reading aound I would have found this excellent article detailing this issue, and more specifically drives known to work in the DL380 and drives known to have this issue. Turns out, most of the WD disks do work, so I replaced the HGST drives with 2 WD Black 750GB drives. Now the server at idle runs with the fans between 10-13% and is actually no louder than a regular desktop.

Back to creating some more VMs 🙂

Installing Grafana on Ubuntu 16.06

Following the install instructions here:

Add the repo to /etc/apt/sources.list and install with apt-get:

deb https://packagecloud.io/grafana/stable/debian/ jessie main

Add key:

curl https://packagecloud.io/gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -

Update and install:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grafana

Start up the server service:

sudo service grafana-server start

To start at boot:

sudo update-rc.d grafana-server defaults

Up!