I've spent the past day working on my newest Poweredge R620 acquisition, and trying to nail down what things I can do without checking. Google has shown me that everyone seems to be having similar issues regardless of brand or model. Gone are the days when a rack server could be fully booted in 90 seconds. A big part of my frustration has been when the USB memory sticks are inserted to get firmware updated before I put this machine in production, easily driving times up to 15-20 minutes just to get to the point where I find out if I have the right combination of BIOS/EUFI boot parameters for each individual drive image.
I currently have this machine down to 6:15 before it starts booting the OS, and a good deal of that time is spent sitting here watching it at the beginning, where it says it's testing memory but in fact hasn't actually started that process yet. It's a mystery what exactly it's even doing.
At this point I've turned off the lifecycle controller scanning for new hardware, no boot processes on the internal SATA or PCI ports, or from the NICs, memory testing disabled... and I've run out of leads. I don't really see anything else available to turn off sensors and such. I mean it's going to be a fixed server running a bunch of VMs so there's no need for additional cards although some day I may increase the RAM, so I don't really need it to scan for future changes at every boot.
Anyway, this all got me thinking... it might be fun to compare notes and see what others have done to improve their boot times, especially if you're also balancing your power usage (since I've read that allowing full CPU power during POST can have a small effect on the time). I'm sure different brands will have different specific techniques, but maybe there's some common areas we can all take advantage of? And sure, ideally our machines would never need to reboot, but many people run machines at home only while being used and deal with this issue daily, or want to get back online as quickly as possible after a power outage, so anything helps...
Unfortunately I can't help with boot speed. Cold boot on enterprise servers tends to be on the slower side even for latest servers at my work across all major vendors. For rebooting the newer ones are faster but the older ones (around same age as R620) are slow to boot no matter what.
For the firmware that system is end of support life so once they are caught up to latest you are done, just an FYI. Do you have a single or multiple Dell servers?
I don't have much experience with single server environments so I'd recommend research & verify everything before attempting to install any firmware. Dell OpenManage Server Administrator looks like it could be helpful. Failing that you can use the iDRAC web interface for some of the firmware installs. You'll need to research to learn which ones can be installed there & the proper order to do them. If your iDRAC has the fancy remote console & media features available you could use those features to handle the rest of the firmware updates as well as install any OS you want on it. If it doesn't and have some budget available then I'd say look on eBay (or equivalent) for iDRAC Enterprise card and license if needed.
If you have multiple Dell servers I would recommend using the OpenManage Enterprise virtual appliance they make. It's free and makes firmware updates on Dell servers quick and easy. It can also handle installing firmware in the correct order when necessary. It will need access to the iDRAC interface.
Agree with this post here. Adding to this thought:
Outside of initial provisioning/firmware updates. This server should only need to reboot once a month for OS/firmware security updates and maintenance. Maybe less/more depending on your organizations security posture. OP said they're running VM's so I don't understand the concern with the boot time. Once you provision the host you don't really tinker with any setting unless your adding hardware to updating firmware/os.
If the boot time is really that big a deal, get a second host and setup replication/vmotion with your VM's to eliminate the host boot time from affecting your uptime entirely.
I am currently running four servers, and I think the R620 is pretty much beyond any future updates. My process has been to bump them to the last BIOS rev, then flash the PERC controller to IT mode, then I can start loading the operating system. So that's at least four different flash keys to go through (and stupid me, I didn't even write down the specific until setting up this last new machine).
I don't expect to ever have to touch any of these items again in their usable lifetime, but I do want to keep some basic hardware checks in place. So like if there's anything I could shut down that is actively looking for updates, I could nix that. Checking PCI cards for bootable devices when the system has 8 internal bays I'm making use of? Yeah that's a waste of time. The problem is we have limited control over what checks can be disabled for our specific needs, and it's not always easy to decipher the mean of those options. I never would have thought it would be a good idea to disable my SATA controller, until I noticed a line at boot saying no AHCI devices found.
Speaking of iDRAC... I've never used this feature before, but my understanding is that using this is the same as doing it directly on the console -- if you make any changes then the server is forced to reboot. Is that correct? Or is there a way to save the new settings but hold off on applying them until the next intentional reboot? Like I would love to get the settings on all of my machines identical now that I've somewhat figured out what I need to do, but I don't want to reboot them until the next good window (and then I'd rather reboot ALL of them together instead of messing with each one at a time). I'm just curious if any of this is possible or if there's really no advantage except remote management?
iDRAC just lets you remote access the device and tweak bios settings or whatever remotely rather than having to use a physical kvm. I know dell and hp have utilities to let you modify bios settings from windows but I'm not sure if that extends to their server platforms as well.
Thanks!
IMO, management interfaces like iDRAC are very nice extra to have when using enterprise servers for homelab.
The base iDRAC allows you to control power state, monitor & configure hardware, and view hardware system event log. The remote console and media features cost extra as part of the Enterprise iDRAC. Remote console lets you access server just like if you were physically in front of it. Remote media lets you mount images over the network to the server and boot from bootable ones too.
It has in band and out of band connectivity methods but I only have experience with out of band.
Cool, thanks! Sounds like something I should at least hook up and check out.
I hope you like it :)