Running Rocky 9 on Dell Poweredge R730xd?

Rocky Linux Help & Support
1

I plan on building a home lab with Dell Poweredge R730xd servers. I’m thinking about using Rocky 9.

According to Dell’s support matrix RHEL 9 is not supported on R730xd, only RHEL 7 & 8.

Does anyone have any experience with running Rocky 9 on Dell servers ? Will I have any random issues, boot issues or some device not appearing (PCI HBA/NICs or SSDs) stuff like that ?

I found this chinese article that seems to suggest that they were able to get Rocky 9.3 running, but with a network source.

2

I’m guessing that the lack of compatibility is due to the age of the CPU. Use this Rocky Linux resource to test your CPU for compatibility.

Thanks,
Steve

2 Likes
3

Yes, I have both Rocky 9.6 and Rocky 10.0 running on Dell PowerEdge R730 (not the XD version with denser disks).

I really like the Dell PowerEdge servers, especially the R730 for a home lab.

I would be happy to answer any questions you have, based on my experience with these servers.

cat /etc/system-release

Rocky Linux release 9.6 (Blue Onyx)

Tony

1 Like
4

Hi Steve,

The Dell R730 have are at the x86-64-v3 micro-archtecture level, so fully capable for even Rocky 10!

I had run “/usr/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 --help” which your reference points to, before I attempted to install Rocky 10.

Subdirectories of glibc-hwcaps directories, in priority order:
x86-64-v4
x86-64-v3 (supported, searched) <== this is the important output line, good for even Rocky 10
x86-64-v2 (supported, searched)

Hopefully this information helps someone.

Tony

5

To me it looks more like Dell not committing support for their old products.

The last “supported” RHEL point releases were released in 2019 or so. Later point releases of same major version were merely “certified”. Obviously, to certify some new OS for old products in 2022 is not in their interest.

What might have effect is the availability of RPM packages that Dell creates for RHEL distros. IME, one rarely needs any of them.

Furthermore, do the servers still have paid support contract? If not, then how much would Dell support even what they do officially support?

6

Hi @R_O_C_K_Y_L_I_N_U_X thank you for the answers.

The processors that these R730xd servers come with are: Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2683 v3 35M Cache, 2.00 GHz.

I’ve been postponing building a home lab because I’m scared about compatibility issues:

  • Buying an HBA and it not showing up or not recognizing the disks / SSDs
  • Buying a 2 port 10 or 25 Gb/s NIC for each server and it not showing up. The DAC cables not working (apparently there are brand specific DAC cables, I didn’t know that)
  • Still looking for refurbished Brocade switches in my town. Not sure if I should continue or just get cheap 10/25 Gb/s switches (like these). Again will the Dell-specific DAC cables work, who knows :slight_smile: ?

I’d like to get your opinion on these things.

7

I stand corrected!! :slight_smile:

8

My answer was about the ability of a standard Dell PowerEdge R730 to run Rocky (either Rocky 9 or Rocky 10) out of the box, because I did it.

I have found it rather easy and inexpensive to purchase used Dell PowerEdge servers on eBay and put Linux on them.

These servers have been web servers, email servers, and DNS servers, on the public internet.

And they have been a capable software development platform for multiple languages, my R730 helped me with a 135 page paper on mathematical cryptography, which I published last month, and it included source code in six different programming languages, all from the R730.

My networking and experimenting needs are different than yours, but I would encourage you to give a Dell R730 a try with one of the versions of Rocky.

I will agree with you that buying anything pre-owned on eBay is a bit of a roll of the dice, a recent purchase had the INSIDE HALF of the rack rails still stuck to the sides of the case.

Tony

1 Like
9

“Networking” is such a broad topic, but I want to mention, the Dell R730 can be configured, in Rocky Linux, for SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), and Paessler PRTG (an acronym for Paessler Router Traffic Grapher) has a lifetime free tier (with up to 100 sensors), you can read about that at Free Network Monitoring | PRTG

Tony

10

I’ve seen DAC that was ok on Dell, but not on ancient HP ProCurve switch.
However, the tranceivers can be even more nitpicky.

ELRepo does build kernel modules for hardware that Red Hat does not support with RHEL: about [ELRepo Wiki]

In addition to RPM packages, they do offer also driver update disk images: Index of /linux/dud/el9/x86_64

As example, if a network card is supported and machine has (unsupported) HBA that would work with ELRepo’s ‘kmod-mpt3sas’, one could append the installer’s cmdline:

inst.dd=https://elrepo.org/linux/dud/el9/x86_64/dd-mpt3sas-48.100.00.00-1.el9_6.elrepo.iso

to get the installer:

  1. download the image on the fly
  2. load the ‘mpt3sas’ module to install to drives on the HBA
  3. install the ‘kmod-mpt3sas’ package to provide ‘mpt3sas’ module for the installed kernel too

The deviceids [ELRepo Wiki] lists device IDs that ELRepo’s packages support.
One can see the device IDs in the system with:

lspci -nn
2 Likes