Riverbed 9350 – old gear recycled

We have the BIG BOSS 🙂

Based on the Specs below:

dual – redundant power supply
3U form factor
2 x AMD Opteron 2346HE 1.8 GHz Quad Core
8 GB ECC (4 x 2 GB)
4 PCI-E
4x Onboard Bypass Ports (Copper)
4x Fiber optic G.E

This makes the old server ideal as iSCSI NAS for our ESXi farm.

In a Nutshell:

Upgrade the memory: 8–>16G which is not too much but should be enough for the current setup.

put some disk into the chassis: 12x 500G 3.5″ SATA

remove the internal 2GB USB storage – place for original RiverbedOS – we don’t need this anymore, we will throw this away – is it way too small to anything nowadays.

install TrueNAS to the machine – We should install to USB/any spinning drive for that purpose

Before we do anything with the server, let’s do some math.

How many disk space we get if we have 12x500G in RaidZ2:

hmm…4TB… Not soo much, we could buy bigger single disks nowadays…

but it would be good enough for us as an iSCSI target, 4TB is should be enough for our LAB/Dev VMs for a while, but time will tell.

Let’s check what we have here: the front of the server:

There is a lot’s of fancy LED on the front panel, but which is way more important: we have 15x free 3.5″ SATA DISK bay for storage.

On the back:

There is lots of G.E connector + we have 2x PCIE card installed into the slots each provide 4xG.E.

Our original plan was to install a brand new Intel 520 converged NIC into the SLOT1, but the Riverbed guys engineered the slot mounting positions different than any other Vendor.

I think we are good to go with 2x 1Gbs in LACP mode now, maybe later I will cut a hole to the original PCIE cover plate with a DREMMEL for the SFPs to properly mount the i520 card.

Originally my plan was to install the machine as a „headless” machine.

This is a little bit tricky, because the SERIAL console using custom pinout – 🙁 – originally we don’t have any video card installed in the machine.

However, an untouched Riverbed machine is locked to boot from the internal USB drive – which is only 2GB in size which makes impossible to boot from an external drive.

So we had to install an old NVIDIA Video card then enter into the BIOS and disable the forced boot + set the correct boot order – boot from USB drive for the first time.

Once we installed the OS to any other SATA drive/external USB then once again you need to go back to the BIOS and set the proper boot order.

We recycled an old 80GB spinning drive from a HP desktop for the BASE OS – I know this is not ideal for an ENTERPRISE storage -, later we will install an SSD for that purpose – luckily the TrueNAS the migration is really easy.