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…
Reflash to Coreboot. Failing that, disable SecureBoot, disable splash screen, disable PXE boot, disable all other boot order options that might try and fail before hitting the OS drive, remove any RAID cards or network cards you’re not using. Remove any drives you’re not using.
I make all my requests early in the morning: 0800 < 1400 - instant time reduction there!
Microsoft says gtfo with your bios settings, they know what’s best, and that means all the checks you say you don’t want. I am guessing that’s your OS vendor…
6 min seems about right for an enterprise server, the more you have like a raid card initialization the longer it will be. Since there devices are designed to be run for months or years without rebooting it really doesn’t matter that the reboot takes as long as it does.
It’s a bit of a shock to me. These are being used to replace some Poweredge 860’s where POST time was pretty identical to that of a desktop, even though they too had PERC raid controllers in them. And sure, the NAS has the PERC plus a pair of 16-port LSI cards to initialize, but that doesn’t seem to make a difference on the boot time between the other machines with only the onboard PERC.
I don’t. Poweredges are slow to boot, not much you can do about that. They’re designed to be very compatible, unlike the desktops. Any time I need to reboot a physical server, I go do something else for a while and come back.
If you want to avoid outages, consider a UPS or a second server for HA.
I concur and it just gets worse the more hardware you have in them. 256G of memory and 24 disks? Might as well go have lunch while it boots.
Damn are all 24 disks internal? That’s some rig! I have the hardware on my latest NAS to connect up to 56 drives in hot-swap bays, and at one point while migrating data to the new drives I had 27 active units. Now that I’ve cleaned it up I’m only running 17 drives but it still seems like quite a stack.
Yea they’re internal. That’s normal for a fully loaded 2u storage server. Some even have 2-4 extra disk slots in the rear to cram in a few more.
