Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis
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The new servers have lever clips that work with square holes and rails. You won't find any adapter to make this work. (If you do, let me know.)
Make sure the steel frame of the server wraps around and is inside the ears. You'll know, the ears will feel like they will hold a MAC truck if the steel chassis goes into them. They will feel very weak if not.
Make sure the rack you are considering will take the weight of the server. At least 100lbs.
Get a two U rack.
Mount the server in the closest U to the wall.
Here is where your imaginations has to work. You need to make sure the server doesn't move around. You can place cage nuts in the next square hole, or you can use what ever you want to keep the server from jumping off the rack. The rack you linked to with the cover is nice because the server can't escape without removing the cover.
Cooling: IF the room is climate controlled, and IF your server load is "normal" you will not have a cooling issue. If, however your load is high and your fans are always screaming, you MAY have a cooling issue that might not exist if mounted horizontally. But I doubt it.
We do this all the time, never had an issue.
YMMV.
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@JasGot said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
Cooling: IF the room is climate controlled, and IF your server load is "normal" you will not have a cooling issue. If, however your load is high and your fans are always screaming, you MAY have a cooling issue that might not exist if mounted horizontally
As Jared said, the orientation of the server doesn't matter. The server is designed to move air from the front to the back.
Not from top to bottom, left to right or any other orientation.
If the room is stupidly hot and the server was horizontal you'd still possibly encounter issues.
And in all reality, servers do just fine so long as you can avoid massive swings in temperature. Even if the temp seems "hot".
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The reason people say that you need to avoid high temps is because you increase the chances of dew developing on the server or inside the room once the temp comes back down.
And since most people don't want to work in sweat-shop server rooms, people tend to say keep it around "room temp". AC is a value-add that often times isn't required.
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@JaredBusch said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@Pete-S said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
Servers are made to be horizontal for proper cooling.
WTF does the orientation have to do with it? Cooling is handled by the fans forcing air to move in a designed direction. In the front and out the back. The orientation of the server means jack shit.
Ah, good to know.
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@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@Pete-S Actually these racks are meant to hold servers - I was looking at the 3U model (in case we wanted to mount anything else down the road) and it's rated to hold over 100 lbs....and the R640 is 48 lbs so I should be more than fine.
Yeah, I see that now. I thought they looked like the wall mounted rack brackets that are made for switches and network gear.
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@DustinB3403 said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
Colocating may not be a viable cost option for the customer and tower servers often way more than a rack server
Are you saying rack servers are cheaper than tower servers?
From what I can see Dell's lowest cost servers are always tower servers - T40, T140 etc.I actually saw one place sell Dell T40 servers for $250 (Xeon 4 core CPU, 8GB ECC RAM and a 1TB drive), otherwise they're around $400.
The cheapest rack server with the same config is $1100 (R240).
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@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
This should work fine as long as your server is under 105lbs. It should be as a Dell R640 is about 49lbs (but it does vary.)
This definitely says that it's compatible as it's labeled as compatible with all 19" rack compatible devices, which the R640 certainly is. We've done this mount style some and it works great. Remember you can't do front to back cooling, it's bottom to top so the "face" of the server always has to be down. This normally improves cooling over front to back but is obviously otherwise super inconvenient.
In a single server environment, this is how I prefer to mount servers because it takes up so much less room and tends to make most things easier (but it makes accessing drives harder.) With SSDs, this is definitely the way to go. Especially with a 1U.
Very easy, very simple.
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@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@DustinB3403 I agree - horizontal sounds preferable to maintain things. That means I would probably have to go with option 1 for sure.
For drives, yes. But for internal parts, actually flush wall mounting is ideal, if you keep it at chest height.
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@scottalanmiller said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@DustinB3403 I agree - horizontal sounds preferable to maintain things. That means I would probably have to go with option 1 for sure.
For drives, yes. But for internal parts, actually flush wall mounting is ideal, if you keep it at chest height.
But internal parts are a shutdown anyway. so who really cares if you need a few extra minutes.
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@JaredBusch said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@scottalanmiller said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@DustinB3403 I agree - horizontal sounds preferable to maintain things. That means I would probably have to go with option 1 for sure.
For drives, yes. But for internal parts, actually flush wall mounting is ideal, if you keep it at chest height.
But internal parts are a shutdown anyway. so who really cares if you need a few extra minutes.
It's less about the time and more about convenience. It's so nice to just pull the top off and have it all totally visible and easily accessible.
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@scottalanmiller said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@JaredBusch said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@scottalanmiller said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@DustinB3403 I agree - horizontal sounds preferable to maintain things. That means I would probably have to go with option 1 for sure.
For drives, yes. But for internal parts, actually flush wall mounting is ideal, if you keep it at chest height.
But internal parts are a shutdown anyway. so who really cares if you need a few extra minutes.
It's less about the time and more about convenience. It's so nice to just pull the top off and have it all totally visible and easily accessible.
While nice, the number of times I need to get to the internal components of a production server in the lifetime of it is less than 1, probably approaching 0.25.
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@scottalanmiller The wallmount rack is the way I decided to go and it's on the way. Apparently I'll be using the stock Dell rails (according to Rack Solutions support). I'm having a hard time imagining how tricky this is going to be to mount given that I'll be installing it by myself. If I'm installing it with the front facing down I feel that might be a little trickier but maybe I'm wrong. Also, this particular server is using SSDs.
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@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@scottalanmiller The wallmount rack is the way I decided to go and it's on the way. Apparently I'll be using the stock Dell rails (according to Rack Solutions support). I'm having a hard time imagining how tricky this is going to be to mount given that I'll be installing it by myself. If I'm installing it with the front facing down I feel that might be a little trickier but maybe I'm wrong. Also, this particular server is using SSDs.
Front down or left or right. Just not up.
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@JaredBusch I'm guessing this is for cooling reasons? Again, sorry for my ignorance, but I've always only rack mounted these.
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@scottalanmiller said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@JaredBusch said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@scottalanmiller said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@DustinB3403 I agree - horizontal sounds preferable to maintain things. That means I would probably have to go with option 1 for sure.
For drives, yes. But for internal parts, actually flush wall mounting is ideal, if you keep it at chest height.
But internal parts are a shutdown anyway. so who really cares if you need a few extra minutes.
It's less about the time and more about convenience. It's so nice to just pull the top off and have it all totally visible and easily accessible.
On these chassis you can mount the server so that the top cover faces "you" and still be able to access everything internally. Short of replacing the entire motherboard there wouldn't be much you can't get at with this mounted onto a wall.
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@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@JaredBusch I'm guessing this is for cooling reasons? Again, sorry for my ignorance, but I've always only rack mounted these.
It's for ease of access to the front and rear of the server.
I personally would mount it with the top panel facing you with the front off to the left or right hand sides.
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@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@JaredBusch I'm guessing this is for cooling reasons? Again, sorry for my ignorance, but I've always only rack mounted these.
Yes. as noted previosuly, servers cool from front to back.
Heat rises, so if you put the front on top, you are making it harder.
Assuming the room is cooled decent, that really does not matter. But does make a difference.
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@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
@JaredBusch I'm guessing this is for cooling reasons? Again, sorry for my ignorance, but I've always only rack mounted these.
The front goes down because heat rises. Front to back cooling when horizontal is built so that you can have cold row (at the front) and hot row (at the back) so that you don't get the hot air from the back making it back to the intake on the server - when that happens a server can overheat even in a cold room.
Same with vertical, cold air is at the floor, warm air is at the ceiling. So you need the intake for the air down low, and then the fans and gravity work together, and when you expel the hot air it will rise away from the chassis. Otherwise you risk little circles of air where the server starts to either suck in its own already heated exhaust or, far less likely, that hot spots arise inside the chassis where air gets trapped because the fans don't reach that corner or nook.
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@scottalanmiller said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
ou risk little circles of air where
My only thought about mounting it front down is that the weight of the server is being held in place by those plastic levers in the front - if anyone was to release those without supporting it correctly it would shoot down on the rails. The room is supposed to be temperature controlled but I'm now thinking horizontal might be the safer option.
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@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:
if anyone was to release those without supporting it correctly it would shoot down on the rails.
That is a good reason to not mount it vertically, but horizontally along one edge or the other.
While the airflow conversation can be debated, I'd very much doubt there is any drastic difference in airflow performance mounted like we're discussing here.
