July 16, 2026
by dhoytt
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Put UPS Equipment Back In Rack

The UPS equipment (Leibert UPStation GTXs) is back in the rack tonight. I placed each UPS battery cluster on separate racks this time so that battery replacement is easier for the extra battery pack on top of the main assembly.

Finding my racking hardware screws, bolts etc has been most of my time. I found the rails I will use for the virtualization servers as well but will not rack those tonight.

Front view
Side view of racking shelves and UPS equipment.
Back side view of UPS equipment.

July 12, 2026
by dhoytt
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Moved C7000 Blade Server From Rack

After performing a successful clone using Clonezilla of my physical BL460 Gen7 blade that was my W2019 Data Center server with Sam Broadcaster that served as my music server, it was time to move my C7000 blade chassis out of my rack and power it down. I’ll have more on my P2V clone to XCP-ng as a VM in another post I already have drafted. 

I am already up on my new XCP-ng virtualization servers and have been on it for a while now. They are hanging out in my hallway and need to come into the rack. There was no space for the new servers in the rack with the C7000 chassis and my UPS equipment. 

The UPS equipment was sitting right on top of my C7000 chassis as its sole support. The UPS are also plugged into my 2 NAS (TrueNAS custom) systems, plus I wanted to make sure that I had my cabling connected properly if I needed to power my C7000 blade server for anything again after moving out of the rack. 

With the C700 powered down, I started with my top UPS cluster and moved the connections to the other UPS clusters. Then moved the UPS to a furniture dolly to the side of the rack, moved the power connections back to the UPS cluster on the furniture dolly. I repeated this with my next two UPS clusters, stacking them on top of each other. Since my NAS systems are dual homed with power, they had no issues along with my switches. My consumer level routers did end up going down however (I plan on replacing the consumer routers with OpenSense custom build soon). I had to reboot my router on my main domain but besides that everything was smooth. 

Next, how to move the C7000 out of the rack and be able to properly connect it back. As you can see, my wire management is not good. What I decided to do was not disconnect the networking cables from the C7000. I traced the networking cables back to their respective switches, disconnected them at the switches, ran them through the back of the rack on top of the C7000 chassis, back to the switches via the front of the rack so that when I pull the chassis out the cables are coming through the rack front with the chassis connected to the switches which are in front of the rack. This way I was able to keep the cables connected where they were in the chassis back to the proper switch. It was easier to determine which switch the cable went to than which module\port in the back of the chassis. 

Then as you can see below, I pulled the C7000 chassis out after disconnecting the power on to another furniture dolly I had and placed it on the other side of the rack. I can now power the C7000 chassis and blades up if I need to for any reason with the proper networking. The power consumption and heat even with the C7000 blade system just idling while plugged in and all the blades down is a bit of a load. My UPS equipment is barely registering anything with the C7000 chassis not plugged into power! 

Next steps will be placing my UPS equipment at the bottom of the rack and then placing my newly built XCP-ng hypervisor servers into the racks, then properly attach all my networking equipment within the rack. I will do better with cable management as well. 

I have to say the physical part of vacating the C7000 went smoother than I thought it would with my plan to systematically move the UPS clusters one at a time. Routing the networking cables through the back of the rack keeping them plugged into the chassis was the big key. 

How it was before moving C7000.
UPS moved out with systems still up.
Back of C7000.
C7000 partially out of the rack onto the furniture dolly.
C7000 and UPS equipment out of the rack finally.
C7000 and UPS equipment out of the rack finally, another view.

June 21, 2026
by dhoytt
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Garden Produce Meals

The garden is producing regularly now and I’m using vegetables and herbs a lot more so in my everyday meals. I want to show the produce and meals of why this is a special time of the year for me when the garden kicks in!

My squash is just going like crazy so I had to get an additional recipe for that like zucchini bread. The tomatoes I just love so want to incorporate them as much as possible.

The past couple of years I have discovered I really like tomatillos. Swiss chard is my go to green leafy vegetable that grows year round.

Fell in love with tarragon a few years back, a few leaves go a long way and leave a slightly sweet pleasant aroma in the house similar to their taste.

Proud of how I handled a spare rib as well cutting off the flap for rib tips making it a St Louis cut. Made some bbq sauce and that complimented my garden veggies.

Using your garden for your meals is awesome and delicious. Just wanted to share with anyone who comes across this post.

Using Swiss chard, cherry tomatoes, sweet and purple basil on hamburger and with bratwurst cooked on my new Weber natural gas grill I had just put together.
Using Tarragon, basil, cherry tomatoes, chives, in my breakfast omelette.
Purple basil, cherry tomatoes, Serrano peppers with, my hamburger, thin chicken breast fillets and bratwurst.
Squash zucchini bread, to have with, ribs and rib tips with vegetable medley of , zucchini, cherry and pear tomatoes, green beans, tomatillo, thyme, tarragon, rosemary from the garden along with an onion from the store.

June 18, 2026
by dhoytt
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Las Vegas Conference Trip

Went to the HPE Discovery trip in Las Vegas for 2026 and as with all conferences had unique experiences outside of the sessions as well.

World first super computer from Cray on display taken out of the museum and present at the conference.
Cooling for current generation of super computer.
Current super computer millions of compute more powerful than the original Cray computer.
F1 formula one car.
Astrolab lunar module.
Air cooled rack

May 10, 2026
by dhoytt
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Tidied Up the Gardens and Front Yard Pool

Pulled weeds in vegetable and flower gardens, trimmed bushes can plus did some extra work on the pool.

Got a lot done in the yard before the weeds could take hold with the veggies starting to hit growth spurts. The flowers in the front are not as nice looking as they were last year this time but getting there. The bushes and tree near the driveway needed trimming.

All the new soil and work in the backyard led to more dirt in the pool. The pool pump issues meant I got a late start on the pool but it’s looking good with the hot weather coming up!

Here’s some pictures.

April 11, 2026
by dhoytt
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2026 Gardens Have Started

Been building up the soil and redoing a few items and moving forward with my gardens.

Testing PH levels
Testing and gathering winter produce.
Trucking in new highly amended soil and mixing it in with newly acquired Rototiller.

Progress adding more soil nutrients and mixing them into the soil.

Setting up rows again this year after going away from them.

Redoing irrigation.

Rototillers with my Craftsman fixed my broken electric cultivator and newly acquired MTD.

Moved a grape vine from growing around irrigation controls. Tweaked irrigation and plants in the ground some transplants and some new.

January 23, 2026
by dhoytt
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Working on New Virtual Servers

Making lots of progress on my new virtual servers that will take over for my Bl460C blades servers, I’m running out of a C7000 blade chassis from HPE. I can’t believe I have been running the C7000 blades for almost 6 years now. Time to get a little relief from power usage and noise. It’s gotten to the point its way to noisy to stay in my office and the power companies ridiculous even with my 11.5kw solar system. 

I did a lot of searching around for motherboards that hold at least 1tb RAM hopefully dual 10gb interfaces, dual CPUs, decent amount of pcie slots, and good IPMI/baseboard management. Then they had to be reasonably priced with fairly recent chip sets so they would not get deprecated anytime soon. Then I had to decide on which of my dozens of chassis’ to choose from and whether to go 2u or 4u. 

I had everything with motherboards, cpus, ram, heat sinks and add on dual 10gbe NICs with prices back in 08/2025. I had other things come up and then went back to my spreadsheet around the end of November and saw that the prices on RAM had quadrupled! Then the motherboards I wanted on the recycle resale market a lot of other people did as well! 

The RAM prices hurt a lot but I was able to get 128GB on each server and will hopefully get more soon. The motherboards I wanted sold out almost completely so I ended up getting a brand I used before on the consumer side but never for their server motherboards which turned out to be a better motherboard than the ones I was targeting! 

I ended up going with some 4U chassis I had in my closet that fit my 11.5″x14″ server motherboard. 

I got them installed finally with xcp-ng 8.3 after a lot of sizing up everything from motherboard standoffs to proper sfps that are recognized in xcp-ng. I bought some high air flow 120mm and for the front of the 4U chassis and 40mm fans serving as exhaust in the rear of the chassis. I may still go with some active heat sinks with fans on the CPUs in place of the passive ones even with that good airflow I now have. They will have some noise but nowhere as much as my current c7000 blade chassis. 

After playing around with my current SCSI hba controller cards and UEFI for booting I decided to go with standard SATA SSDs so I wouldn’t have to play around with different firmware updates and switching between scsi adapters getting them recognized at boot. They work fine with UEFI for capacity after booting but not for booting unless I flash the firmware possibly. I’ll setup a test system for flashing the scsi adapters later. I hate using sata but will update that later as these systems will not be coming up and down or be written too much anyway. XCP-ng and Xen before them has proven easy enough to recover from, and I’ll backup the configs plus get an image to store. 

Tonight, I resolved my 10gbe add on card issue. I ordered Intel X520-DA2 Dual Port SFP+ 10GB NIC and they didn’t show up properly in XCP-ng with an error in dmesg “failed to load because an unsupported SFP+ or QSFP module type was detected” I saw in the xcp-ng forum (https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/4055/xcp-ng-8-2-xcp-ng-and-intel-x520-da2-10gbit-card-with-non-intel-sfp-transceivers) others ran into this issue when the transceiver was not genuine Intel. I pulled out the transceivers, and they were a Citrix transceivers!  

That was last week and today the genuine Intel transceivers came in and dmesg looked recognized the new NICs but didn’t present then in the UI network session of the dashboard or in the cli as eth4 and eth5 as they were shown in dmesg 

[ 10.807221] ixgbe 0000:86:00.1 side-2640-eth5: renamed from eth5 

[ 10.857857] ixgbe 0000:86:00.0 side-2856-eth4: renamed from eth4 

Recalled and found a procedure to properly add the NICs https://docs.xcp-ng.org/networking/#add-a-new-nic. Props also to https://christoph-jahn.com/xcp-ng-new-network-card-not-visible/. 

This is what I did to find the host uuid:

# xe host-list
uuid ( RO)                : 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90
          name-label ( RW): mojave
    name-description ( RW): Default install

This is what I did to show current recognized network interfaces:

# xe pif-list
uuid ( RO)                  : b216bcff-ed61-19db-6db9-2b892dbc4b5b
                device ( RO): eth3
                   MAC ( RO): d8:5e:d3:8d:b1:f3
    currently-attached ( RO): true
                  VLAN ( RO): -1
          network-uuid ( RO): 1e220677-6f50-b52c-7912-0415f47c62e7
             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90


uuid ( RO)                  : 0aa14f8c-1930-1ecb-e381-63c3aad87823
                device ( RO): eth0
                   MAC ( RO): d8:5e:d3:8d:b1:f0
    currently-attached ( RO): true
                  VLAN ( RO): -1
          network-uuid ( RO): 139e13fc-8a0d-8584-33b5-e43fe9abf46d
             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90


uuid ( RO)                  : ae6f1d91-7f19-565c-3b39-c2bda8ea9188
                device ( RO): eth1
                   MAC ( RO): d8:5e:d3:8d:b1:f1
    currently-attached ( RO): true
                  VLAN ( RO): -1
          network-uuid ( RO): 11c83dc4-1843-76f5-c813-d31eae38061d
             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90


uuid ( RO)                  : 87669ed1-9979-6476-e346-df5daf1929a7
                device ( RO): eth2
                   MAC ( RO): d8:5e:d3:8d:b1:f2
    currently-attached ( RO): true
                  VLAN ( RO): -1
          network-uuid ( RO): 5d63b2c9-b17e-fee7-41f1-c7448cfe43fd
             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90

Scan for new network interfaces:

#xe pif-scan host-uuid=20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90

Verify newly recognized network interfaces along with prior ones:

# xe pif-list
uuid ( RO)                  : b216bcff-ed61-19db-6db9-2b892dbc4b5b
                device ( RO): eth3
                   MAC ( RO): d8:5e:d3:8d:b1:f3
    currently-attached ( RO): true
                  VLAN ( RO): -1
          network-uuid ( RO): 1e220677-6f50-b52c-7912-0415f47c62e7
             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90


uuid ( RO)                  : a6043d0a-169e-0bc3-155b-9d55ddde3deb
                device ( RO): eth4
                   MAC ( RO): b4:96:91:b7:d6:1c
    currently-attached ( RO): true
                  VLAN ( RO): -1
          network-uuid ( RO): 4c5a9530-2319-3a21-45ae-5166060f3213
             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90


uuid ( RO)                  : 0aa14f8c-1930-1ecb-e381-63c3aad87823
                device ( RO): eth0
                   MAC ( RO): d8:5e:d3:8d:b1:f0
    currently-attached ( RO): true
                  VLAN ( RO): -1
          network-uuid ( RO): 139e13fc-8a0d-8584-33b5-e43fe9abf46d
             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90


uuid ( RO)                  : 88d4884c-ab08-9bde-6e09-315a11b6e8f0
                device ( RO): eth5
                   MAC ( RO): b4:96:91:b7:d6:1e
    currently-attached ( RO): true
                  VLAN ( RO): -1
          network-uuid ( RO): 0b4a0127-395a-c504-d186-e61b674975e6
             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90


uuid ( RO)                  : ae6f1d91-7f19-565c-3b39-c2bda8ea9188
                device ( RO): eth1
                   MAC ( RO): d8:5e:d3:8d:b1:f1
    currently-attached ( RO): true
                  VLAN ( RO): -1
          network-uuid ( RO): 11c83dc4-1843-76f5-c813-d31eae38061d
             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90


uuid ( RO)                  : 87669ed1-9979-6476-e346-df5daf1929a7
                device ( RO): eth2
                   MAC ( RO): d8:5e:d3:8d:b1:f2
    currently-attached ( RO): true
                  VLAN ( RO): -1
          network-uuid ( RO): 5d63b2c9-b17e-fee7-41f1-c7448cfe43fd
             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90


Plugin newly recognized network interfaces:

#xe pif-plug uuid=a6043d0a-169e-0bc3-155b-9d55ddde3deb
#xe pif-plug uuid=88d4884c-ab08-9bde-6e09-315a11b6e8f0

Here are UI Images of XO Lite XCP-Ng interface after various commands.

This is how the UI looked with Intel X520-DA2 Dual Port SFP+ 10GB NIC prior to pif scan.
This is how the UI looked with Intel X520-DA2 Dual Port SFP+ 10GB NIC after pif scan.
This is how the UI looked with Intel X520-DA2 Dual Port SFP+ 10GB NIC after plugin command. The two disconnected NICs are on board 1gbe NICs I will not be using.
This is my current situation with the HP C7000 blade chassis and blades servers. Wire management is not great right now!
Current build of virtual server number one. Messy but will be cleaned up once all done and tested.

Current build of virtual server number two. Messy but will be cleaned up once all done and tested.

Currently whats in the new virtual servers subject to change with additions on the way.

  • Gigabyte MD71-HB0 2x LGA3647 C622 DDR4 2x 10GbE M.2/U.2 E-ATX Motherboard
  • Intel Xeon Gold 6248 2.5 GHz 20 Cores SRF90 CD8069504194301
  • Supermicro SNK-P0068PS LGA3647-0 2U & UP X11 Scalable CPU Heatsink Narrow ILM
  • 256GB 8x 32GB 4Rx4 PC4-17000L DDR4 2133 MHz ECC LRDIMM Server Memory RAM
  • Intel X520-DA2 Dual Port SFP+ 10GB NIC
  • 4U Case 16″x22″ with 11.5″x14″ for motherboard
  • 60mm x 25mm Dual Ball Bearing High Air Flow Server DC 12V Cooling Fan
  • ARCTIC S12038-8K 120mm 8k rpm Server Fan
  • 1TB Pony SATA ssd for booting.