Hardware Donations

[Rogean]

Hey Everyone,

I wanted to post a quick note to the community about hardware donations. While the project does receive a steady income of donations to cover most costs, there are some of you that have inquired about what kind of hardware we'd be looking for, which may be helpful before needing to spend any of that money.

In 2019, shortly before Green launched, we purchased a brand new HPE Gen10 server which is currently dedicated to hosting our production game databases and the Green server. That server is solid and will last us for some time.

Other than that server, however, we are running on a hodgepodge of used hardware consisting of Cisco UCS M3 and Dell R710. While Green and Blue run on physical hardware (Green on the HPE Gen10, Blue on a Cisco UCS M3 C220), the rest of the servers are in a VMWare Cluster. This includes virtual machines running Red Game Server, P99 Website, EQEmu Website, EQEmu Loginserver, Wiki Website, Replication Databases, Backup Jobs, and our Backend system (Used for logs and CSR Tools).

Cisco UCS M3 and Dell R710 both went end of sale in 2016. To give you an idea, the UCS Server's CIMC Interface (The motherboard management) utilizes a flash interface, which is not possible to access on modern browsers. Cisco has no plans to provide a firmware update to resolve this (Basically: Tough shit, upgrade your hardware).

This hardware has served us well over the years, but it is starting to show it's age. We're beginning to see some instability, particularly with the Cisco UCS that is acting as our SAN right now.

Let me be clear about this post though, we are not currently in a predicament or begging for help. We are simply evaluating our options to replace some of this hardware, and felt that a post might be a good idea before we start looking to spend thousands of dollars on hardware. We've always made sure to spend the Donation money sparingly and intelligently.

So, if you are in a position that gives you access to, or the ability, to donate relatively newer/used enterprise level hardware, please reach out to me on Discord.

Thanks!