7 ms·

That WoW server blade

104 points by facorreia 12y ago

oconnor0 12y ago
4 blades to run an entire realm? That's more impressive than I thought.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - RyJones 12y ago
    That's exactly what he says on the web page. :)
- mpthrapp 12y ago
  I wonder how many blades per realm they use now with the new continents and whatnot.
- dsl 12y ago
  No, they just sold 4 blades per realm for a charity auction. A few months later the used equipment market was flooded with the same blades, so I imagine they offloaded quite a bit of hardware.
- stavrus 12y ago
  That was probably the case back in vanilla (pre-expansion) WoW. With the introduction of cross-realm battlegrounds in 1.12 - a month before the first expansion - followed by the activation of arenas in the first expansion, they most likely considerably expanded their server capacity to accommodate for the increased load. I remember seeing news articles back in the day just a few months before Burning Crusade's launch that Blizzard had bought a massive amount of servers, but the only thing I can find now is this blog post: http://www.rahulsood.com/2006/02/blizzard-going-crazy-for-opteron.html http://www.rahulsood.com/2006/02/blizzard-going-crazy-for-op... However, it's important to note that around this time Blizzard was heavily improving their Battle.NET service and launched a download service where you could register your CD keys from their previous games such as Starcraft and Warcraft III and download a fully working ISO that did not require the physical CD to run. The server purchases may have gone towards that instead. Would love it if Blizzard wasn't so secretive about everything, especially their tech. CCP, makers of Eve Online, have been very forthcoming in talking about their entire stack in their developer blogs and videos - from infrastructure and hardware, to how they profile their code and the software design choices they make.
  - crazypyro 12y ago
    The market for private WoW servers in the past has been a major concern for Blizzard and I'd imagine has been a large motivator in their decision to closely guard their infrastructure design.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
dsl 12y ago
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wWPD9DlVIJAJ:augustl.com/blog/2014/that_wow_server_blade/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wWPD9Dl...
- augustl 12y ago
  Out of curiosity, do you remember how long my blog was down? Linode reports 100% uptime and no monitoring show traces of congestion.
jokoon 12y ago
I still wonder about how many players those servers could hold, and what about other MMO games networking architecture ? For examples I know that in guild wars, once you get out of town, you don't see other players. In wow they also merged many zones so they are "cross realm". How does EVE online work by the way ? I'm fascinated by this stuff. I wish there was an unique realm MMO game like wow. I guess EVEO is unique level. I'd love to see a game using more p2p architectures to enable small parties to offload servers.
- neemsio 12y ago
  I share your level of enthusiasm with this. I've done a bit of work on a project with ZeniMax concerning the virtual environment for ESO's servers. Let's just say that the magnitude and scale of their server rooms is enormous, and they build virtual environments on top of enormous scale to increase thresholds.
- chillacy 12y ago
  Patrick Wyatt (worked at blizzard on WC, starcraft, battle.net, then on guild wars) blogged a bit about the design of some of these games: http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/scaling-guild-wars-for-massive-concurrency http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/scaling-guild-wars-for-massi... Worth a read
  - scrollaway 12y ago
    Less tech-oriented and more design-oriented, Alexander Brazie has blogged a lot about various design decisions he and his team made at the time in WoW. https://alexanderbrazie.blogspot.co.uk https://alexanderbrazie.blogspot.co.uk
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  EVE, I believe, doles solar systems out to different servers (and shuffles them around depending on load). This results in slowdowns for enormous battles - they're too big for one server to process in real-time, so ticks get further apart.
  - 12y ago
kevinoconnor7 12y ago
Oh man, my first year of college I was in a freshman seminar and idly bid on one of these with a fairly low offer (~$200). Twenty minutes later I was the proud owner of a WoW server. My lack of foresight has led to it being stuck, still in the original shipping box, in my parent's basement.
- dwild 12y ago
  You are lucky, I didn't bid because I thought it would go way higher than theses prices. I still regret it.
- thehermit 12y ago
  I envy you greatly. When these were put on sale a freak snowstorm happened to hit the northeast and me and everyone else around had no power for close to a week. I was after one of the more populated servers (Kil'jaeden) and my phones battery just didn't last long enough to get that final bid in. I still regret not just putting in a higher bid earlier that day.
  - kevinoconnor7 12y ago
    I just found my winning bid e-mail: I got Quel'Thalas for $212.50 on 2011-10-24. I remember that freak Halloween snow storm.. somehow it managed to avoid hitting me the capital region. I'll probably sell the server at some point but I have no idea what a fair price for it is. Perhaps I'll sell it using a double-blind auction.
mahouse 12y ago
I would really like to know the software architecture of a WoW realm. (Beyond the basics of... one blade for each continent). OS, tools, programming languages, how did the different parts of the software (such as, again, continents) communicate between themselves... For example, I was told once dungeons and raids were/are scripted in Lua.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- valarauca1 12y ago
  >Beyond the basics of... one blade for each continent). On launch there was 2 continents, but 4 server blades per server. Scripted events take place in Lua. But most raids until I believe Cataclysm weren't scripted so much as it was just mob abilities + cool downs. Note: Not a wow server architect just played way to much WoW
  - mahouse 12y ago
    These things I know. WoW server reimplementations are pretty monolithic and that causes a lot of problems on heavy loads. I know of a private server that's working on having some "load balancing" to avoid that. What I mean by this is that currently the only way to have lots of players playing at once in the same realm is to buy very expensive hardware. That plus the amount of DoS attacks you receive if you are popular means that having a private WoW server online is anything but cheap.
- Shivetya 12y ago
  To get an idea how they grouped zones a bit, this picture was taken showing the expansion zones for Burning Crusade, apparently you could move between them with a few tricks. https://i.imgur.com/768UM.jpg https://i.imgur.com/768UM.jpg I was always more impressed with Asheron's Call management of areas, as they initially had one zone friend world, it would load land blocks as players accessed them.
  - mahouse 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- chrisan 12y ago
  Not everyone subscribes to /r/hackernews. I had not see this post before
- freehunter 12y ago
  You don't think it's possible that the same content can be interesting to audiences of two different sites? Most of the stuff at lobste.rs is reposts from HN, and stuff from HN gets posted to Reddit as well. I see stuff from HN on Ars Technica and CNet occasionally, and vice versa. It's not a competition. It's the Internet. We're all the same.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- benaiah 12y ago
  "If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - Fastidious 12y ago
    The parent comment was deleted, but I saw this on Reddit[1] before it popped in here. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/2cyu9d/closeups_of_wow_server_blade_sunstrider_auctioned/ http://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/2cyu9d/closeups_of_wow_...
guard-of-terra 12y ago
What's the definition of a blade? I thought it was a diskless server but this one used to have a hard drive.
- wmf 12y ago
  Making diskless servers work is too complex for most admins, so blades are generally sold with disks. Blades are generally cable-less and share power, cooling, and networking within the chassis.
- incision 12y ago
  >'What's the definition of a blade?' I'm not sure there's any hard and fast definition. Generally, a blade is going to share power at least, likely network uplinks as well. Diskless configurations are common, with some sort of shared storage being used, but local disk is finding its way back into blades via SSD.
- benjarrell 12y ago
  To me a blade is a server that you have to have a blade chassis in order to use it.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Wow, the memories and the pain. Its weird because I spent enough time in Azeroth that I think of it as a 'place' and as a place with fond memories that I cannot go back to as Blizzard has moved on, its oddly painful for me. It was the only game where the social aspects were as fun, or sometimes more fun, than the game play. That said, I worked at NetApp when WoW first released and their architecture at the time was these blade servers talking to oracle database instances that were using EMC SAN boxes for storage. We tried to convince them they would have less down time if they converted to Oracle over NFS as Oracle had done in their big data center in Texas. As an engineer it started me thinking about the whole 'world as a database transaction' sort of model of things. How that got built, where did latency matter, where did it not? What could you un-do and what had to be at-most-once. And then the scale of that with respect to localizing transactions when actors (characters) were within scoping distance of database changes. Quite the interesting challenge. Oh and the 'weird custom board' on that blade is a compact flash to IDE adapter. The blades booted from compact flash. EDIT: Hmm, not CF adapter, going back and looking again I think that was the NVRAM card which allowed them to recover transaactions after a server crash.
- incision 12y ago
  >'oracle database instances that were using EMC SAN boxes for storage.' I can only imagine what the bill for that setup looked like. Did they jump all in with a Symmetrix? >'It was the only game where the social aspects were as fun, or sometimes more fun, than the game play.' Personally, the social aspects are what eventually drove me to quit MMOs for good (so far) not long into the life of WoW. It seems to me that a lot of people look to MMOs for escape and a situation where the game world is simultaneously one person's preferred life and another's play time is a recipe for trouble.
  - lostcolony 12y ago
    >Personally, the social aspects are what eventually drove me to quit MMOs for good (so far) not long into the life of WoW. Likewise, though for a different reason. I never engage enough, even in a guild or similar, I guess because I usually end up playing MMOs without RL friends jumping in, and I find the limited interactions sufficiently boring I eventually leave the game, as the gameplay isn't enough in any MMO to keep me.
Daneel_ 12y ago
I've worked extensively with HP equipment. I've just sent August an email with a ton of extra detail about this blade. The 'weird custom card' mentioned in ChuckMcM's comment is actually a SmartArray 6i raid controller. The black slot is to put a small stick of ram into to act as cache. Happy to answer any and all questions about the server :) Out of interest, there are two CPUs in this server, and they're both an AMD Opteron 275 (2.2 GHz, dual core). The 512MB Hynix ram sticks would have come from the factory, while the 2GB micron sticks would have been an upgrade.
- ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
  Thank you for reaching out and helping to complete the story of this box. Maybe someone from Blizz can even tell them what the server's role was...
  - Daneel_ 12y ago
    Posting the email I sent: I saw your blog post about your WoW blade, via Hacker News, and couldn't help but want to contribute. I have worked as a sysadmin and hardware specialist for the past 5-6 years, with a lot of experience with HP equipment - I was wondering if you'd like me to help provide better descriptions of any of the parts of your blade? Extra detail like the fact that Hynix ram came in the machine from the factory, but the micron ram was added as an upgrade. Your machine probably only ever had those 6 sticks in it, as the next generation of servers used newer DDR2 and wasn't compatible (hence no reason to remove ram from this blade). That blade is what is called a 'half-height blade and it would have sat vertically in a Blade Enclosure, ie, the HPBL25p text would be horizontal. Blade enclosures usually hold up to 16 half-height blades, or 8 full height blades, but yours is a p-class blade, so it would have been in an enclosure for half-height blades only (8 blades max). The network ports and all other connections are on the blade enclosure. If you'd like a full spec sheet on your blade and the enclosure, you can look at this PDF from HP: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/images/ap/BL25p_v7.pdf http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/images/ap/BL25p_v7.pdf Regarding your concerns about the CPUs and heatsink paste, etc: The CPUs will actually be attached to the heatsinks and you should simply be able to lift them out as a unit. This is done so that if a CPU were to fail in the blade you can replace the CPU in just a few minutes. The detail of which CPU you have is more than likely attached to the underside of the heatsink as well, next to the processor, but you can actually tell which one you have from the model number (that sticker that says 392439-B21). It's an HP ProLiant BL25p 275 2.2GHz-1MB Dual Core 2P 2GB Blade Server. This means your CPUs are AMD Opteron 275s, and you have two of them. The '5' in BL25p also indicates an AMD CPU. Intel servers end in a zero. I can also tell you what most of the bits of hardware on the motherboard do too, if you like.. I'm happy to annotate photos. The large green card towards the rear of the server with the little silver heatsink and the empty black slot is the hard drive controller. In this server the model would be a SmartArray 6i. The slot is for a small stick of RAM (128MB for this model) that the controller would have used for cache - it probably never had any installed though. As general information: the little 'add in cards' are called daughter-boards, and are actually completely normal in servers, especially of this size, partially due to space constraints. The main reason for daughter boards though is so you can quickly and easily replace a failed component. Servers are generally designed to be easily and quickly serviceable. I've personally replaced a server motherboard in under 10 minutes (from power off to power back on again). It's generally all tool-less and extremely modular. The clear magnetised lid on these server is definitely not standard - Blizzard must have added this when they decided to memorialise the server. The standard lid would be metal and held on with a quick-release lever mechanism.. I really like the magnetised approach though :) I can keep going on, but yeah, let me know if you'd like any information or more insight into the server. Glad to see that it's in the hands of someone who obviously cares about the equipment though :) it's nice that they made them into a collectible rather than just selling them to a used equipment vendor.
ymeshesha 12y ago
Does anyone know when exactly they changed their specs?

104 points by facorreia 12y ago

oconnor0 12y ago

4 blades to run an entire realm? That's more impressive than I thought.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- RyJones 12y ago
  That's exactly what he says on the web page. :)
mpthrapp 12y ago
I wonder how many blades per realm they use now with the new continents and whatnot.
dsl 12y ago
No, they just sold 4 blades per realm for a charity auction. A few months later the used equipment market was flooded with the same blades, so I imagine they offloaded quite a bit of hardware.
stavrus 12y ago
That was probably the case back in vanilla (pre-expansion) WoW. With the introduction of cross-realm battlegrounds in 1.12 - a month before the first expansion - followed by the activation of arenas in the first expansion, they most likely considerably expanded their server capacity to accommodate for the increased load. I remember seeing news articles back in the day just a few months before Burning Crusade's launch that Blizzard had bought a massive amount of servers, but the only thing I can find now is this blog post: http://www.rahulsood.com/2006/02/blizzard-going-crazy-for-opteron.html http://www.rahulsood.com/2006/02/blizzard-going-crazy-for-op... However, it's important to note that around this time Blizzard was heavily improving their Battle.NET service and launched a download service where you could register your CD keys from their previous games such as Starcraft and Warcraft III and download a fully working ISO that did not require the physical CD to run. The server purchases may have gone towards that instead. Would love it if Blizzard wasn't so secretive about everything, especially their tech. CCP, makers of Eve Online, have been very forthcoming in talking about their entire stack in their developer blogs and videos - from infrastructure and hardware, to how they profile their code and the software design choices they make.
- crazypyro 12y ago
  The market for private WoW servers in the past has been a major concern for Blizzard and I'd imagine has been a large motivator in their decision to closely guard their infrastructure design.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

dsl 12y ago

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wWPD9DlVIJAJ:augustl.com/blog/2014/that_wow_server_blade/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wWPD9Dl...

augustl 12y ago
Out of curiosity, do you remember how long my blog was down? Linode reports 100% uptime and no monitoring show traces of congestion.

jokoon 12y ago

I still wonder about how many players those servers could hold, and what about other MMO games networking architecture ? For examples I know that in guild wars, once you get out of town, you don't see other players. In wow they also merged many zones so they are "cross realm". How does EVE online work by the way ? I'm fascinated by this stuff. I wish there was an unique realm MMO game like wow. I guess EVEO is unique level. I'd love to see a game using more p2p architectures to enable small parties to offload servers.

neemsio 12y ago
I share your level of enthusiasm with this. I've done a bit of work on a project with ZeniMax concerning the virtual environment for ESO's servers. Let's just say that the magnitude and scale of their server rooms is enormous, and they build virtual environments on top of enormous scale to increase thresholds.
chillacy 12y ago
Patrick Wyatt (worked at blizzard on WC, starcraft, battle.net, then on guild wars) blogged a bit about the design of some of these games: http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/scaling-guild-wars-for-massive-concurrency http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/scaling-guild-wars-for-massi... Worth a read
- scrollaway 12y ago
  Less tech-oriented and more design-oriented, Alexander Brazie has blogged a lot about various design decisions he and his team made at the time in WoW. https://alexanderbrazie.blogspot.co.uk https://alexanderbrazie.blogspot.co.uk
ceejayoz 12y ago
EVE, I believe, doles solar systems out to different servers (and shuffles them around depending on load). This results in slowdowns for enormous battles - they're too big for one server to process in real-time, so ticks get further apart.
- 12y ago

kevinoconnor7 12y ago

Oh man, my first year of college I was in a freshman seminar and idly bid on one of these with a fairly low offer (~$200). Twenty minutes later I was the proud owner of a WoW server. My lack of foresight has led to it being stuck, still in the original shipping box, in my parent's basement.

dwild 12y ago
You are lucky, I didn't bid because I thought it would go way higher than theses prices. I still regret it.
thehermit 12y ago
I envy you greatly. When these were put on sale a freak snowstorm happened to hit the northeast and me and everyone else around had no power for close to a week. I was after one of the more populated servers (Kil'jaeden) and my phones battery just didn't last long enough to get that final bid in. I still regret not just putting in a higher bid earlier that day.
- kevinoconnor7 12y ago
  I just found my winning bid e-mail: I got Quel'Thalas for $212.50 on 2011-10-24. I remember that freak Halloween snow storm.. somehow it managed to avoid hitting me the capital region. I'll probably sell the server at some point but I have no idea what a fair price for it is. Perhaps I'll sell it using a double-blind auction.

mahouse 12y ago

I would really like to know the software architecture of a WoW realm. (Beyond the basics of... one blade for each continent). OS, tools, programming languages, how did the different parts of the software (such as, again, continents) communicate between themselves... For example, I was told once dungeons and raids were/are scripted in Lua.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
valarauca1 12y ago
>Beyond the basics of... one blade for each continent). On launch there was 2 continents, but 4 server blades per server. Scripted events take place in Lua. But most raids until I believe Cataclysm weren't scripted so much as it was just mob abilities + cool downs. Note: Not a wow server architect just played way to much WoW
- mahouse 12y ago
  These things I know. WoW server reimplementations are pretty monolithic and that causes a lot of problems on heavy loads. I know of a private server that's working on having some "load balancing" to avoid that. What I mean by this is that currently the only way to have lots of players playing at once in the same realm is to buy very expensive hardware. That plus the amount of DoS attacks you receive if you are popular means that having a private WoW server online is anything but cheap.
Shivetya 12y ago
To get an idea how they grouped zones a bit, this picture was taken showing the expansion zones for Burning Crusade, apparently you could move between them with a few tricks. https://i.imgur.com/768UM.jpg https://i.imgur.com/768UM.jpg I was always more impressed with Asheron's Call management of areas, as they initially had one zone friend world, it would load land blocks as players accessed them.
- mahouse 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

chrisan 12y ago
Not everyone subscribes to /r/hackernews. I had not see this post before
freehunter 12y ago
You don't think it's possible that the same content can be interesting to audiences of two different sites? Most of the stuff at lobste.rs is reposts from HN, and stuff from HN gets posted to Reddit as well. I see stuff from HN on Ars Technica and CNet occasionally, and vice versa. It's not a competition. It's the Internet. We're all the same.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
benaiah 12y ago
"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Fastidious 12y ago
  The parent comment was deleted, but I saw this on Reddit[1] before it popped in here. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/2cyu9d/closeups_of_wow_server_blade_sunstrider_auctioned/ http://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/2cyu9d/closeups_of_wow_...

guard-of-terra 12y ago

What's the definition of a blade? I thought it was a diskless server but this one used to have a hard drive.

wmf 12y ago
Making diskless servers work is too complex for most admins, so blades are generally sold with disks. Blades are generally cable-less and share power, cooling, and networking within the chassis.
incision 12y ago
>'What's the definition of a blade?' I'm not sure there's any hard and fast definition. Generally, a blade is going to share power at least, likely network uplinks as well. Diskless configurations are common, with some sort of shared storage being used, but local disk is finding its way back into blades via SSD.
benjarrell 12y ago
To me a blade is a server that you have to have a blade chassis in order to use it.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Wow, the memories and the pain. Its weird because I spent enough time in Azeroth that I think of it as a 'place' and as a place with fond memories that I cannot go back to as Blizzard has moved on, its oddly painful for me. It was the only game where the social aspects were as fun, or sometimes more fun, than the game play. That said, I worked at NetApp when WoW first released and their architecture at the time was these blade servers talking to oracle database instances that were using EMC SAN boxes for storage. We tried to convince them they would have less down time if they converted to Oracle over NFS as Oracle had done in their big data center in Texas. As an engineer it started me thinking about the whole 'world as a database transaction' sort of model of things. How that got built, where did latency matter, where did it not? What could you un-do and what had to be at-most-once. And then the scale of that with respect to localizing transactions when actors (characters) were within scoping distance of database changes. Quite the interesting challenge. Oh and the 'weird custom board' on that blade is a compact flash to IDE adapter. The blades booted from compact flash. EDIT: Hmm, not CF adapter, going back and looking again I think that was the NVRAM card which allowed them to recover transaactions after a server crash.

incision 12y ago
>'oracle database instances that were using EMC SAN boxes for storage.' I can only imagine what the bill for that setup looked like. Did they jump all in with a Symmetrix? >'It was the only game where the social aspects were as fun, or sometimes more fun, than the game play.' Personally, the social aspects are what eventually drove me to quit MMOs for good (so far) not long into the life of WoW. It seems to me that a lot of people look to MMOs for escape and a situation where the game world is simultaneously one person's preferred life and another's play time is a recipe for trouble.
- lostcolony 12y ago
  >Personally, the social aspects are what eventually drove me to quit MMOs for good (so far) not long into the life of WoW. Likewise, though for a different reason. I never engage enough, even in a guild or similar, I guess because I usually end up playing MMOs without RL friends jumping in, and I find the limited interactions sufficiently boring I eventually leave the game, as the gameplay isn't enough in any MMO to keep me.

Daneel_ 12y ago

I've worked extensively with HP equipment. I've just sent August an email with a ton of extra detail about this blade. The 'weird custom card' mentioned in ChuckMcM's comment is actually a SmartArray 6i raid controller. The black slot is to put a small stick of ram into to act as cache. Happy to answer any and all questions about the server :) Out of interest, there are two CPUs in this server, and they're both an AMD Opteron 275 (2.2 GHz, dual core). The 512MB Hynix ram sticks would have come from the factory, while the 2GB micron sticks would have been an upgrade.

ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
Thank you for reaching out and helping to complete the story of this box. Maybe someone from Blizz can even tell them what the server's role was...
- Daneel_ 12y ago
  Posting the email I sent: I saw your blog post about your WoW blade, via Hacker News, and couldn't help but want to contribute. I have worked as a sysadmin and hardware specialist for the past 5-6 years, with a lot of experience with HP equipment - I was wondering if you'd like me to help provide better descriptions of any of the parts of your blade? Extra detail like the fact that Hynix ram came in the machine from the factory, but the micron ram was added as an upgrade. Your machine probably only ever had those 6 sticks in it, as the next generation of servers used newer DDR2 and wasn't compatible (hence no reason to remove ram from this blade). That blade is what is called a 'half-height blade and it would have sat vertically in a Blade Enclosure, ie, the HPBL25p text would be horizontal. Blade enclosures usually hold up to 16 half-height blades, or 8 full height blades, but yours is a p-class blade, so it would have been in an enclosure for half-height blades only (8 blades max). The network ports and all other connections are on the blade enclosure. If you'd like a full spec sheet on your blade and the enclosure, you can look at this PDF from HP: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/images/ap/BL25p_v7.pdf http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/images/ap/BL25p_v7.pdf Regarding your concerns about the CPUs and heatsink paste, etc: The CPUs will actually be attached to the heatsinks and you should simply be able to lift them out as a unit. This is done so that if a CPU were to fail in the blade you can replace the CPU in just a few minutes. The detail of which CPU you have is more than likely attached to the underside of the heatsink as well, next to the processor, but you can actually tell which one you have from the model number (that sticker that says 392439-B21). It's an HP ProLiant BL25p 275 2.2GHz-1MB Dual Core 2P 2GB Blade Server. This means your CPUs are AMD Opteron 275s, and you have two of them. The '5' in BL25p also indicates an AMD CPU. Intel servers end in a zero. I can also tell you what most of the bits of hardware on the motherboard do too, if you like.. I'm happy to annotate photos. The large green card towards the rear of the server with the little silver heatsink and the empty black slot is the hard drive controller. In this server the model would be a SmartArray 6i. The slot is for a small stick of RAM (128MB for this model) that the controller would have used for cache - it probably never had any installed though. As general information: the little 'add in cards' are called daughter-boards, and are actually completely normal in servers, especially of this size, partially due to space constraints. The main reason for daughter boards though is so you can quickly and easily replace a failed component. Servers are generally designed to be easily and quickly serviceable. I've personally replaced a server motherboard in under 10 minutes (from power off to power back on again). It's generally all tool-less and extremely modular. The clear magnetised lid on these server is definitely not standard - Blizzard must have added this when they decided to memorialise the server. The standard lid would be metal and held on with a quick-release lever mechanism.. I really like the magnetised approach though :) I can keep going on, but yeah, let me know if you'd like any information or more insight into the server. Glad to see that it's in the hands of someone who obviously cares about the equipment though :) it's nice that they made them into a collectible rather than just selling them to a used equipment vendor.

ymeshesha 12y ago

Does anyone know when exactly they changed their specs?