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PowerEdge C6220 II "Killer of 1U form factor" 2U Rack Server with four "sleds"

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Introduction

Dell’s C6220 II server squeezes four Xeon E5-2600 v2 systems into 2U of rack space, essentially doubling density.  It is sometimes called "Killer of 1U form factor" server ;-)

C6220 was released in April 26, 2012 and in 2013 updated for Xeon E5-2600 v2 line of Intel CPUs.  It is a custom machines for very large customers who want fewer bells and whistles but higher computing density and lower power consumption. The PowerEdge C6220 is being marketed as a high-density server solution primarily targeting HPC (high-performance computing) and virtual server clusters.

It has weak onboard RAID controller (mainly for Windows, for Linux you need at least $200 additional card and only 1Gbit NIC cards on the motherboard. So it you want 10Gbit you need to put an additional card.

The C6220 offers four completely independent, hot-swappable server nodes. Each server node can be configured independently of the other nodes in the same chassis to perform specific tasks. They can have different CPUs, different amount of memory and different number of hard drive, providing better flexibility in respect to harddrives that 1U servers. The chassis also accepts a pair of dual-height nodes which have two PCI-e expansion slots.

The four nodes are accessed at the rear where each one provides dual Gigabit ports (not 10GBit), IPMI, two USB2 port, VGA and a serial port.

C6220 allow to use CPUs consuming up to 135W. This means the entire range of E5-2600 and v2  CPUs is supported. PowerEdge C6220 II Rack Server

PowerEdge C6220 II - Built for performance

Highlights:

Each node supports:

Typical use

C6220 II can be used in various high-workload-intensive environments.

Remote management

Remote management is done differently then in standard Dell servers -- not via DRAC but via so called Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), which is  a microcontroller located on the server’s system board. BMC provides the “intelligence” within the IPMI architecture, responsible for monitoring and controlling the server’s manageable devices. Capabilities are very similar to DRAC but organized in diferent menus. It also has Java console.  Among features:

Dynamic allocation of HD between nodes

Drives are installed in enclusure not in sled. Up to 12 x 3.5" or 24 x 2.5" hot-swappable SAS, SATA or SSD drives are supported. Thar means 48TB SATA and 48TB SAS maximum storage per chassis.

You can allocate different number of harddrives to each node if you use 2.5" expander backplane:

 

Electrical efficiency

Help maximize performance and operating efficiency with the established shared-infrastructure design of the PowerEdge C6220 II.

Get up to 40% greater performance and improved energy efficiency in the same award-winning PowerEdge™ C6220 shared infrastructure chassis with the latest Intel® Xeon® E5-2600v2 processors.

Technical specifications

Feature PowerEdge C6220 II technical specifications
Chassis 2U rack mount
Processors Up to four 2-socket servers, 4, 6, 8, 10 or 12 cores per processor

Intel Xeon processor E5-2600v2 product family, with L3 cache: up to 30MB

Memory 16 DIMM slots for up to 512GB per node:
  1. 4GB/8GB/16GB (1.5V) DDR3 RDIMM (1866MT/s)
  2. 32GB LV DDR3 RDIMM (1333MT/s)
 
  1. 4GB/8GB/16GB LV (1.35V) DDR3 RDIMM (1600MT/s)
  2. 4GB LV DDR3 UDIMM (1600MT/s)
Chipset Intel C602 chipset
Video Integrated AST2300 with up to 16MB video RAM
Primary storage Maximum internal storage: 48TB SATA or NL 48TB SAS
Drive bays and hard drives 24 x 2.5" or 12 x 3.5" hard drive options

2.5" SAS (15K): 146GB, 300GB

2.5" SAS (10K): 600GB, 900GB, 1.2TB

2.5" SATA: 500GB, 1TB

2.5" NL SAS (7.2K): 1TB

2.5" SATA SSD (eMLC): 100GB, 200GB, 400GB, 800GB

3.5" SATA (7.2K): 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB

3.5" SAS (15K): 600GB

3.5" NL SAS (7.2K): 2TB, 3TB, 4TB

Connectivity Intel Ethernet Controller i350, 2 x 1Gb Ethernet; 1 x 100Mb Ethernet dedicated management port
USB ports 2 external ports
I/O slots 1U-node version: 1 x8 mezzanine, 1 x16 half-height (low profile), half-length slot

2U-node version: 1 x8 mezzanine slot; 1 x16 full-height, half-length slot; 1 x16 full-height, full-length slot

I/O adapter options 1Gb Ethernet

Intel i350 quad-port 1Gb adapter

Intel 82580 ET quad-port 1Gb mezz

10Gb Ethernet

Intel 82599 dual-port 10Gb DA/SFP + mezz

Intel X520 dual-port 10Gb DA/SFP + mezz

InfiniBand

Mellanox® ConnectX®-2 QDR dual-port mezz

Mellanox ConnectX-3 FDR single-port mezz

Dell X410 host interface card (HIC) for connection to the C410x

Drive and RAID controllers Intel C602: SATA or SSD drives only

LSI® 2008 6Gbs SAS mezzanine (optional)

LSI 9265-8i 6Gbs SAS add-in controller (optional)

Power supplies Dual hot-plug redundant high-efficiency 1200W or 1400W power supplies
Fans Shared cooling with quick-disconnect 4x 60mm speed fans detectable with PWM control
Operating systems Novell® SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2

Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®

Microsoft® Windows Server® 2012

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise x64 SP1

Microsoft Windows® HPC Server 2008 R2 x64 SP1

Server management Embedded BMC with IPMI 2.0 support with 1x 10/100 Mbps RJ45 connector

Intel Node Manager 2.0 compliant

Hypervisors Citrix® XenServer®

VMware® vSphere® ESXi™

Microsoft Hyper-V® Server 2008 R2 SP1

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(Availability varies by region. Please contact your sales representative for details.)

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Old News ;-)

[Poweredgec-tools] Ipmi command on C6220

Adam Hough Adam.Hough at pgs.com
Fri Sep 6 07:50:14 CDT 2013


I am in the process of upgrading the firmware on some of our C6220 systems using the ipmiflash utility.
I have several systems that have hung during the "Validating Image" in that it will never exit that stage of the flash.  I can kill the update script but leaves the ipmi interface in "update mode".  The only way I know how to get it out of this sate it to reseat the sled in the chassis to reboot the ipmi controller as in this state the ipmi controller ignores any reset commands (which is the correct action to prevent bad stuff during the actually flash).

Is there a raw ipmi command I can send to get it out of the "update mode"?

Adam Hough
Senior Computer Systems Engineer, NSA
Global Compute Resources

Two things about this -


1) for convenience I use ipmiflash on all my test systems. but at scale I use socflash only, because it does raw reads/writes to the flash rom. It never fails. However, socflash defaults the MAC address of the BMC, which you have to put back. So the procedure is to capture those macs, socflash the bmc, put them back. "bmc" tool has a convenience function you can use to facilitate this; you have to run this locally on the box. From memory:

bmc get_both_macs | tee /tmp/mymacs

# Be sure to confirm that every /tmp/mymacs file looks right / has macs in it. I've recently seen occasionally that this would fail. (Fix forthcoming)

# Apply a new image; skip image backup step; use the "all*.bin" file when you flash with socflash

socflash_x64 -s allXXXXX.bin

bmc set_both_macs /tmp/mymacs

Note - this wipes all bmc settings including which NIC it uses; so you go back to shared/DHCP.

2) Because of how it works, socflash can also be used to hard reset and/or revive a hung (or even completely dead) BMC. This resets the BMC as a side effect of reading the image and throwing it away. There are very, very few situations where this will not work:

# Hard reset a BMC

socflash of=/dev/null
The user friendly version of that is to get "peclogs" from http://poweredgec.dell.com and run the command line option to reset the bmc (I forget what it's named).

Be careful with socflash. It's powerful, but it has quirks and basically no safeties.

Michael Stumpf
System Management & Tools
Dell | PowerEdge C

Josh_Moore at Dell.com Josh_Moore at Dell.com
Fri Sep 6 08:38:29 CDT 2013
Dell - Internal Use - Confidential
Good morning Adam
To add to Michael's information
The reset syntax that I have for socflash is
socflash option=r of=/dev/null
As Michael pointed out, this functionality is built into the pec-logs utility as well, the syntax is
pec-logs.sh --bmc-reset


Josh Moore

Dell c6220 IPMI controller odditites

Dell c6220 IPMI controller odditites"

The networking configuration of the IPMI controllers on our new Dell c6220 boxes is strange to say the least. We've encountered issues where the IPMI controller binds to a random interface, usually making itself inaccessible to the world.

I've done some digging into this, and it seems that the IPMI controller is really an embedded Linux device (no surprise there). It has two main network interfaces:

Speaking of configuring the network mode, you have two options for this '1' or '2'. The documentation doesn't indicate which is which, but based on my testing '1' is shared networking, and '2' is dedicated networking. Seems silly they couldn't manage to put descriptions in for this.

SuperMike-II - Dell PowerEdge C6220, Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.600GHz, Infiniband QDR TOP500 Supercomputer Sites

Site: Louisiana State University

System URL: http://www.hpc.lsu.edu/systems/system.php?system=Supermike2

Manufacturer: Dell

Cores: 7,040

Linpack Performance (Rmax) 110.93 TFlop/s

Theoretical Peak (Rpeak) 146.432 TFlop/s

Power: 200.00 kW

Memory: 14,080 GB Interconnect: Infiniband QDR

Operating System: Linux

Compiler: GCC, gfortran

Math Library: Intel MKL 11.339.sp1

MPI: OpenMPI 1.6


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Last modified: March 12, 2019