So… The server didn’t boot. OS not found. After more testing it turned out no OS could be installed at all. No VMware, no Windows 2k3, no Linux Debian… Back to the shop again to return the server. The next day I could pick up the server again. The shop had screwed up the bios settings before they returned the server…. Normally I’d check these things myself. But as we bought the server as a whole with the intention we didn’t need to fuck around with it ourselves, I’ll have the people from the shop fix these issues. Now I have the server again. VMware, still an issue. After contacting VMware it turns out VMware might not work properly as the hardware used is not officially supported. As we’re also running out of time (COD5 public beta comes soon), I can’t be arsed anymore with VMware. VMware, it’s a beautiful piece of software. Perhaps next time we’ll be able to use it. The server now runs windows 2003 64bit release 2. This seems to be running just fine. Bucky and me have been stress testing the server last night, and here are some interesting results; The server seems to be all stable. It survives all Prime95 tests without a single error. Prime95 puts up immense amount of load on the machine with several tests. If it completes this without errors, your hardware pretty much seems to be working good. To start off with the benchmarks, we first did a test with calculating SuperPi. The result was pretty amassing. It completed the calculation within 8.7 seconds. To compare, on my own pc, it takes 32 seconds on there. Next we performed a test on our single hard disk. It performs almost as good in read/write as a Raptor 10.000RPM raid0 setup. The access time at the other hand was much faster. The raptor setup had a access time of 8.7ms. Our SAS disk has an access time of 5.6ms. It looks like we finally are going to be able to enjoy our new machine! I’ll try and round up the installation and configuration tonight, and might go to the datacenter tomorrow night after work to replace old MrBlonde with this powerful machine! Keep an eye out for news, you might very soon be enjoying the new server very soon as well.