PowerEdge Flashcards by Dillon Thomas

The XE 9680 handles what types of processing?

artificial intelligence, Machine learning, Deep learning, llm training workloads. Such as neural networks, natural language processing, digital twins modeling and recommendation engines on large datasets

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XE 9640 use cases

Deep learning training, scientific research and data analytics

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XE8640 use cases

High performance computing (HPC) modeling and simulation, and AI/ML-DL

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XE8545 use cases

Designed to run complex, compute-intensive workloads

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Which generations run DDR4 and which run DDR5

14G and 15G DDR4
16G DDR5

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What percs are associated with what Gen?

14G - perc 9 and 10
15g - perc 10.5 and 11
16G - perc 12

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Which generations used NDC, OCP and LOM

14G - NDC

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Physical diagnostics

-System health and system ID indicator codes
-iDRAC quick sync 2 indicator codes
-iDRAC Direct LED indicator codes
-NIC indicator codes
-Power Supply indicator codes
-Non-redundant power supply indicator codes
-Hard drive indicator codes
-uSATA SSD indicator codes
-Internal dual SD module (IDSDM) indicator codes

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System health/system ID indicator codes

Blue solid - healthy
Blinking Blue -ID mode
Amber solid - Fail-safe mode
Blinking solid - system fault

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iDRAC Quick Sync 2 indicator codes

Off- shows the feature is turned off
White solid - Ready to comunicate
Blinking white fast - data transfer activity
blink white slow - firmware update in progress
Blink whit five times fast and turns off - feature disabled
Amber Solid - Fail-safe mode
Blinking amber - not responding properly

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iDRAC Direct LED

Solid green for 2 seconds - laptop or tablet is connected
flashing green on for two seconds and off for 2 seconds - laptop is recognized
Turns off - laptop unplugged

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Nic indicator

off - NIC is not connected
green and activity is blinking - connected to network at max speed and data is transmitted

link amber and activity green - connected but less than max speed
link amber and activity off - connected at less than max speed, no data
blinking green, activity off - NIC identify is enabled

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Power supply indicator

Green - connected
Blinking amber - Problem
Off - no power
Blinking green - firmware update
bling green five times and off- mismatch

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Hard drive indicator

flashes green twice a second - identifying or preparing for removal
off - ready to insert or removal
flashes green, amber then off - PDL
flashes amber four times a second - Drive failed
Flashes green slow - online
alternating green amber and off 3 seconds - Rebuild stopped

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uSATA SSD indicator

flashes green twice a second - identifying or preparing for removal
off - ready to insert or remove
flashes green amber off - PDL
flashes amber four times a second - failed
steady green - Online
green, amber, off 3 seconds - Rebuild stopped

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IDSDM indicator

Green - online
flashing green - rebuild
flashing amber - mismatch or failure
Amber - offline, failed or write-protected
off - missing or booting

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running software diagnostics

support assist, PAS/ePSA and WinDbg

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About HDD

uses spinning disks
Offer high storage at low cost per gig
slower than SSDs and NVME
SAS is a common interface.

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About SSD

-use flash memory offering faster speeds and reliability then HDDs
-No moving parts, low power consumption and durable
-SAS and SATA are common interfaces

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About NVMe

-High performance interface protocol allows ssds to communicate directly to CPU for significantly faster speeds and low latency.

-ideal for applications that require high throughput and low latency like databases, virtualized environments and cloud hosting

-U.2 is a common form factor in servers

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What is DLC on a PowerEdge?

Direct Liquid Cooling. Introduced in 15G.

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What is a perc?

Poweredge RAID Controller
Enhanced RAID performance

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What is Pmem

persistent memory

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Option to view and configure the processor and where is this located

Processor settings, found in the system setup utility

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architecture extends processor addressability and enhances interrupt delivery performance.

X2Apic

What is xGMI2

Interchip global memory interconnect. This is an AMD feature

What are the levels of Xeon Scalable processors?

Least to greatest Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum

What kind of memory do PowerEdge servers run on?

Error-Correcting Code memory

What does ECC memory do?

Can test and correct mem erros without processor or user being aware and without interrupting operations on the server

How does ECC work?

Compares data bits and code bits if correct or the able to be corrected it will let data out. If compared and cannot be fixed, it gives an error signal

Dimm Types

RDIMM LRDIMM NVDIMM-N NVDIMM-BP

Where can memory settings be accessed?

Lifecycle controller system setup option. 1. reboot 2.F2 during boot 3. System bios 4. Memory settings

Memory settings in system bios

- System memory testing - Memory Operating mode - Node interleaving

A self healing memory enhancement that works to repair the issue by disabling the location/address at the hardware layer, enabling a spare memory row to be used instead

Post Package Repair (PPR)

solution that retains data during a power loss, system shutdown or system errors.

Persistent Memory

What are the operational modes of persistent memory

Memory mode or app direct mode

What is pmem's mem mode

Mem mode uses the dimm as memory only

What is pmems app direct mode

Uses the dimm as storage.

Different power supply configurations

Grid Redundant - Power is distributed equally across both power supplies. If a single PSU failes. Power will drop down. No Redundant - The host spare is enabled and power factor correction is disabled. If a single PSU fails. Power may drop.

Option used to limit the amount of power consumed by a server

Power Capping

When do fans ramp up?

- System cover is removed - System is powered on - iDRAC is rebooted

Fan Types

Standard STD High performance HPR Very high performance VHP

When are VHP fans typically employed?

in 2.5inch NVMe storage configs and GPU configs

types of heat syncs

1u standard heat sync T-type and L-type 2u high performance heat sink

How are GPU's cooled in XE series?

Aire-cooled chassis, or liquid assisted air-cooled. Also with hot-pluggable GPU fans and specialized heat sinks for each GPU

Where are the fan speed and exhaust temp settings available?

iDRAC UI, Server setup F2 at boot and RACADM

When is a DLC (Direct Liquid Cooling) solutution not offered?

After point of sale, this cannot be an upgrade.

what is attached to the processor when using DLC?

cold plates

What is within the host when there is internal support for DLC

- Cold plates - Liquid Leak Sensor (LLS) board - Liequid Cooling Rear I/O board ( monolithic architecture only) - liquid cooling module

Benefits or liquid cooling

Increased cooling capacity Improved Energy Efficiency Higher Compute Density Swift Serviceability

What do 12,13 and 14G servers use for networking?

Network Daughter card (NDC)

What do newer gen servers use for networking?

Open Compute Project cards (OCP)

How do OCP cards connect?

Connect to the PCI bus

Benefits of an OCP card

-Removable -Flexibility to choose interconnect (speed) - Does not consume a PCIe slot - replaced the NDC - Physically smaller than the ISA expansion card.

Are NDC's and OCPs hot swappable?

Enable both CPUs with a dual-socket server to connect directly to the network through its own dedicated PCIe interface

SNAP I/O

Benefits of SNAP I/O

- low latency, CPU utilization and higher network throughput - Nic is directly connected to both CPU sockets - bpyasses the Ultra Path Interconnect - Provides maximum use of available resources

Difference between SNAP I/O and SNAPI

Snap I/O plugs into the system board, on AMD servers SNAPI uses a cable that connects to a riser on Intel servers

Components required to enable socket direct cards (SNAP I/O, SNAPI)

- SNAPI capable NIC - SNAPI capable risers - SNAPI cable that is connected to CPU 2

What is a RIO card?

Rear Input Output card

What does the RIO consit of?

- iDRAC port - VGA - USB - ID Button - Chassis intrusion switch cable - Optional serial connector

What is a LOM?

Lan on Motherboard

What does the LOM consist of?

a Broadcom 5720 1Gb dual port interface

What is the difference in RIO cards on a server with a direct cooling configuration?

the althernate RIO card does not come with a VGA port

examples of GPU computation in a server

- Vectored-floating point operations (games or movie rendering process) - General purpose simulations (intensive number crunching)

Difference in cores between GPUs and CPUs

- CPUs consist of minimal cores optimized for serial processing - GPUs consist of thousands of smaller, more efficient cores designed for parallel performance

What is a FPGA

Field Programmable Gate Arrays.

What can FPGA's do?

can be dynamically reprogrammed with a data path that exactly mathces workloads, such as data analaytics, image inference, encryption and compression

What are ASICs?

Application-Specific Integrated Circuits

What do ASIC's do?

built for specific purposes such as graph computing with massively parallel, low-precision floating-point computing.

What are IPU's

Intelligent processor unit chips in graphcore are an AI processor. Specifically designed for artificial intelligence

GPU use cases

- Machine and deep learning - Accelerated database - Seismic processing - Visualization - Signal procssing - Modeling and simulation - Accelerated database - Predictive analytics - Streaming data - Financial modeling

What is CUDA?

Compute Unified Device Architecture

NVIDIA parallel computing platform and programming model

CUDA

Cuda divides work into small independent work and

solves independently among the CUDA blocks

System board temperature that exceeds thresholds degrades?

the GPU performance

If a system board inlet temperature warning is logged, what does the GPU do?

lowers the power consumption to avoid thermal consumption to avoid thermal damage

What is a PCIe?

Peripheral component interconnect express. The bus that connects supported peripheral components.

The size of a PCIe bus determines?

The maximum number of PCIe lanes

How many times the bandwidth does an x8 lane have over a x4 lane?

twice the bandwidth

What controls the PCIe slots in a server?

The system board processors

Common PCIe Server peripherals

- Boss - PERC - NIC - Accelerators (GPU's, FPGAs, IPU's)

What do riser cards do?

enable users to install additional expansion cards for the server

What storage is a logical device interface for accessing nonvolatile storage media that attach through a PCIe bus or switch?

NVMe Non-Volatile Memory express

Which storage has the below advantages? - Enables PCIe lanes to communicate with flash media - Provides higher input and output operations per second - Eliminates the SCSI bottleneck caused due to array latency - Reduces the latency of flash-based infrastructure - Lowers power consumption of the server

The NVMe. Non-Volatile Memory express

What do NVMe SSD's use when being installed into the board slot

2.5 inch U.2 in carrier

What connects an NVMe backplane to the systemboard and interfaces with the system board chipset

Paddle Cards.

What Gen uses Paddle Cards?

15G

Provides a redundant SD-card module for operating systems and embedded hypervisors

IDSDM

From ESXi 7 and above What is used instead of IDSDM?

A BOSS card

What type of storage has the below features? - Maintains mirror mode config by using SD cards in both slots to provide redundancy - Provicdes high performance and data protection - Provides active mode and standby mode options for dual SD cards - Supports single card operation without redundancy - Also supports a vFlash card with an iDRAC Enterprise licesnse

IDSDM

A simple RAID solution card designed specifically for booting a server's operating system

BOSS-S1

What drives are in a BOSS-S1 card?

M.2 SATA drives

Difference between a BOSS-S1 Adapter card and a BOSS-S1 Modular Card

The Modular card only has 1 M.2 SATA Drive

What storage has the below features? - Supports up to two 6Gbps M.2 SATA drives - M.2 devices are read-intensive with 240GB or 480GB capacity - Creates a single virtual disk from the available drives

BOSS-S1

An enhanced RAID solution card that is designed for booting a servers OS

BOSS-S2

What storage has the below features? - Supports 2 m.2 SATA solid-state devices - Provides a rear-facing module for quick and easy accessibility to the M.2 SSDs - Enables full hot-plug support - Connects using PCIe Gen 2.0 with four lanes - Supports two SATA generation 3 ports

BOSS-S2

Difference with connecting a BOSS S1 and BOSS S2

BOSS-S2 has cables. When replacing a BOSS-S2. Be sure to remember the signal cable and power cable connections happen on both the boss side and system board side

Where can you configure and manage a BOSS card?

iDRAC, System Setup Utility, OMSA and BOSS CLI

What combines multiple drive components into a single logical unit?

RAID

What storage concept has the below features - Enables system to write data across multiple hard drives - Divides storage space into stripes - Enhances performance by accessing multiple drives simultaneously but provides no redundancy

RAID 0

Disadvantages of RAID 0 to concider

No redundancy failure of one disk leads to entire data loss

What storage concept has the below features - Data written to one disk is simultaneously written to another disk - If one disk fails, the contents of the other disk can be used to run the system and rebuild the failed drive - provides data redundancy

RAID 1

What are the disadvantages of RAID 1?

- Write performance is reduced - Disk space is wasted

What is RAID 1 ideal for?

Mission critical storage and hosting operating systems

What storage concept has the below features? - Combines distributed parity with disk striping - Provides redundancy for one hard drive failure without duplicating the contents of entire hard drive.

RAID 5

Advantages of RAID 5

- high read performance - efficient use of capacity - allows 1 drive failure

disadvantages of RAID 5

Longer rebuild of data

What storage concept has the below feature? - uses the concept of dual parity with block-level disk striping - allows two disk failures without duplicating the contents of entire physical disk

RAID 6

How is the disk capacity calculated?

n-2 meaning if there are four disks then the virtual disk capacity is the total size of two disks. If its 6 disks then the capacity is 4

Disadvantages of RAID 6

- Write performance decreases due to dual parity calculations - Additional cost required due to two disks dedicated parity

What storage concept has the below features? - minimum of four disks, two disks are striped and mirrored onto two other disks, creating a single array of disk drives

RAID 10

disadvantage of RAID 10

- Expensive and complex to setup -Essentially uses only half of its storage capacity - One drive can fail from each mirrored set, but two drives cannot fail with the same RAID 1 set. Failure of two drives in the same span leads to data loss

What storage concept has the below features? - Combines block level striping with distributed parity

RAID 50

What is the minimum number of disks required to configure RAID 50?

Disadvantages of RAID 50

Failure of two drives in the same span leads to data loss

What storage concept has the below features? - Parity is distributed across all drives in the array - Fault Tolerance

RAID 60

Minimum number of disks for RAID 60?

8 disks

What is a dedicated standby disk called that is activated when hard drive in a virtual disk fails

hot spare

hot spare type that is assigned to all virtual disks on the controller

Global hot spare

hot spare type that is only assigned to one virtual disk on the controller

Dedicated hot spare

hot spare type that once enabled, any slots with hot spares configured automatically become hot spare spare slots Meaning if a host spare disk fails or is removed, a replacement disk that is inserted into the same slot becomes a hot spare with the same properties

Persistent hot spare