{"id":691,"date":"2014-11-24T21:05:22","date_gmt":"2014-11-24T21:05:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zensonic.dk\/?p=691"},"modified":"2017-04-09T10:02:27","modified_gmt":"2017-04-09T10:02:27","slug":"migration-to-a-new-lowpower-server-thinkpad-t420","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zensonic.dk\/?p=691","title":{"rendered":"Migration to a new lowpower server (Thinkpad T420)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently bought myself a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.elvvs.dk\/p\/spar-o-meter-energimaaler-t-stikkontakt-33357\/\">spar&#8217;o&#8217;meter,<\/a> (kill&#8217;a&#8217;watt like device) which is able to measure the power usage of electrical equipment. To my horror I found that my &#8220;lowpower&#8221; AMD fusion based server consumed around 50 watt! Clearely something had to be done.<\/p>\n<p>Luckily I had the right piece of equipment at hand. A lenovo thinkpad T420 with a broken\/shattered LCD. Any decent laptop is built to minimize power consumption, so using an T420 alone would save on the electrical bill, but I went a bit further. More precisely:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Took off the (broken) TFT and disconnected it from the mainboar<\/li>\n<li>Took out the bluetooth module<\/li>\n<li>Took out the wireless module<\/li>\n<li>Disabled all unneeded peripherals, serial ports, usb ports,<\/li>\n<li>Bouht myself a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.storagereview.com\/wd_red_25_1tb_hdd_review_wd10jfcx\">1TB WD red 2.5&#8243;<\/a>, which consumes around 1 watt.<\/li>\n<li>Removed the DVD drive.<\/li>\n<li>Enabled maximum power settings in the bios.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I then put in 2 x 4GB of memory and together with the core i5 cpu, this would be a nice server with a built-in &#8220;ups&#8221;. On the software part, I migrated away from one big server years ago. I run esxi on my servers now. There was a small issue here, as ESXi 5.5 does not have support for the Intel Gigabit 82579 LM chip out of the ISO file.<\/p>\n<p>This is not a biggie. You patch the iso with the correct <a href=\"http:\/\/dl.dropbox.com\/u\/27246203\/E1001E.tgz\">driver<\/a> for the E1000E chip using the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.v-front.de\/p\/esxi-customizer.html\">esxi-customizer<\/a> script and then you boot the customized .iso file.<\/p>\n<p>I ended up with a esxi host that consumes 12 watt. A factor 4 better than my old AMD fusion based setup. And it feel snappier as well. The trade-off: I had to go from 2 x 2TB disks to 1 x 1TB. But that alone saved 10-15 watt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently bought myself a spar&#8217;o&#8217;meter, (kill&#8217;a&#8217;watt like device) which is able to measure the power usage of electrical equipment. To my horror I found that my &#8220;lowpower&#8221; AMD fusion based server consumed around 50 watt! Clearely something had to be done. Luckily I had the right piece of equipment at hand. A lenovo thinkpad [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,16,4,33,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esxi","category-fun-projects","category-hardware","category-upgrade","category-virtualization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zensonic.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zensonic.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zensonic.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zensonic.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zensonic.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zensonic.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zensonic.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zensonic.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zensonic.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}