{"id":3509,"date":"2026-01-23T00:00:02","date_gmt":"2026-01-23T08:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dhoytt.com\/mainblog\/?p=3509"},"modified":"2026-01-23T00:20:34","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T08:20:34","slug":"working-on-new-virtual-servers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dhoytt.com\/mainblog\/2026\/01\/working-on-new-virtual-servers\/","title":{"rendered":"Working on New Virtual Servers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I ended up going with some 4U chassis I had in my closet that fit my 11.5″x14″ server motherboard.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>) others ran into this issue when the transceiver was not genuine Intel. I pulled out the transceivers, and they were a Citrix transceivers! \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ 10.807221] ixgbe 0000:86:00.1 side-2640-eth5: renamed from eth5 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ 10.857857] ixgbe 0000:86:00.0 side-2856-eth4: renamed from eth4 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

This is what I did to find the host uuid:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

# xe host-list\nuuid ( RO)                : 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90\n          name-label ( RW): mojave\n    name-description ( RW): Default install\n<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
This is what I did to show current recognized network interfaces:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
# xe pif-list\nuuid ( RO)                  : b216bcff-ed61-19db-6db9-2b892dbc4b5b\n                device ( RO): eth3\n                   MAC ( RO): d8:5e:d3:8d:b1:f3\n    currently-attached ( RO): true\n                  VLAN ( RO): -1\n          network-uuid ( RO): 1e220677-6f50-b52c-7912-0415f47c62e7\n             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90\n\n\nuuid ( RO)                  : 0aa14f8c-1930-1ecb-e381-63c3aad87823\n                device ( RO): eth0\n                   MAC ( RO): d8:5e:d3:8d:b1:f0\n    currently-attached ( RO): true\n                  VLAN ( RO): -1\n          network-uuid ( RO): 139e13fc-8a0d-8584-33b5-e43fe9abf46d\n             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90\n\n\nuuid ( RO)                  : ae6f1d91-7f19-565c-3b39-c2bda8ea9188\n                device ( RO): eth1\n                   MAC ( RO): d8:5e:d3:8d:b1:f1\n    currently-attached ( RO): true\n                  VLAN ( RO): -1\n          network-uuid ( RO): 11c83dc4-1843-76f5-c813-d31eae38061d\n             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90\n\n\nuuid ( RO)                  : 87669ed1-9979-6476-e346-df5daf1929a7\n                device ( RO): eth2\n                   MAC ( RO): d8:5e:d3:8d:b1:f2\n    currently-attached ( RO): true\n                  VLAN ( RO): -1\n          network-uuid ( RO): 5d63b2c9-b17e-fee7-41f1-c7448cfe43fd\n             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Scan for new network interfaces:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
#xe pif-scan host-uuid=20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90\n<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Verify newly recognized network interfaces along with prior ones:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
# xe pif-list\nuuid ( RO)                  : b216bcff-ed61-19db-6db9-2b892dbc4b5b\n                device ( RO): eth3\n                   MAC ( RO): d8:5e:d3:8d:b1:f3\n    currently-attached ( RO): true\n                  VLAN ( RO): -1\n          network-uuid ( RO): 1e220677-6f50-b52c-7912-0415f47c62e7\n             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90\n\n\nuuid ( RO)                  : a6043d0a-169e-0bc3-155b-9d55ddde3deb\n                device ( RO): eth4\n                   MAC ( RO): b4:96:91:b7:d6:1c\n    currently-attached ( RO): true\n                  VLAN ( RO): -1\n          network-uuid ( RO): 4c5a9530-2319-3a21-45ae-5166060f3213\n             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90\n\n\nuuid ( RO)                  : 0aa14f8c-1930-1ecb-e381-63c3aad87823\n                device ( RO): eth0\n                   MAC ( RO): d8:5e:d3:8d:b1:f0\n    currently-attached ( RO): true\n                  VLAN ( RO): -1\n          network-uuid ( RO): 139e13fc-8a0d-8584-33b5-e43fe9abf46d\n             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90\n\n\nuuid ( RO)                  : 88d4884c-ab08-9bde-6e09-315a11b6e8f0\n                device ( RO): eth5\n                   MAC ( RO): b4:96:91:b7:d6:1e\n    currently-attached ( RO): true\n                  VLAN ( RO): -1\n          network-uuid ( RO): 0b4a0127-395a-c504-d186-e61b674975e6\n             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90\n\n\nuuid ( RO)                  : ae6f1d91-7f19-565c-3b39-c2bda8ea9188\n                device ( RO): eth1\n                   MAC ( RO): d8:5e:d3:8d:b1:f1\n    currently-attached ( RO): true\n                  VLAN ( RO): -1\n          network-uuid ( RO): 11c83dc4-1843-76f5-c813-d31eae38061d\n             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90\n\n\nuuid ( RO)                  : 87669ed1-9979-6476-e346-df5daf1929a7\n                device ( RO): eth2\n                   MAC ( RO): d8:5e:d3:8d:b1:f2\n    currently-attached ( RO): true\n                  VLAN ( RO): -1\n          network-uuid ( RO): 5d63b2c9-b17e-fee7-41f1-c7448cfe43fd\n             host-uuid ( RO): 20816004-5e79-4f5b-bc8c-1d98d3ad6e90<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n

Plugin newly recognized network interfaces:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
#xe pif-plug uuid=a6043d0a-169e-0bc3-155b-9d55ddde3deb\n#xe pif-plug uuid=88d4884c-ab08-9bde-6e09-315a11b6e8f0<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Here are UI Images of XO Lite XCP-Ng interface after various commands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
This is how the UI looked with Intel X520-DA2 Dual Port SFP+ 10GB NIC prior to pif scan.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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This is how the UI looked with Intel X520-DA2 Dual Port SFP+ 10GB NIC after pif scan.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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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.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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This is my current situation with the HP C7000 blade chassis and blades servers. Wire management is not great right now!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Current build of virtual server number one. Messy but will be cleaned up once all done and tested.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Current build of virtual server number two. Messy but will be cleaned up once all done and tested.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Currently whats in the new virtual servers subject to change with additions on the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n