The DELL generation 13 servers are blazingly fast and capable servers. That’s has been well documented by now and more and more people are experiencing it themselves. These are my current preferred servers due to the best value in the market for hard core, no nonsense, high performance virtualization with Hyper-V.
They also have better boot/reboot speeds than the previous generations with UEFI. We noticed this during deployment and testing. So we decided to informally check how much things have improved.
Using the DELL DRAC8 We test the speed form Windows Server restart …
… over the various boot phases …
… to the visual appearance of the logon screen
So now let’s quickly compare this for a DELL PowerEdge R720 and a PowerEdge R730. Bothe with the same amount of memory, cards, controllers etc. None of these servers had VMS running or another workload at the time of restart.
For the R720 this gave us:
and the results for a Windows initiated server restart on a DELL PowerEdge 730 with EUFI boot is:
This was reproducible. So we can see that we EUFI boot times have decrease with about 30%. I like that. You might think this is not important but it adds up during trouble shooting or when doing Cluster Aware Updates of a large 16+ node cluster.
Now thing are beginning to look even better as vNext of Windows has this feature call “Soft Restart” which should help us cut down on boot times even more when possible. But that’s for another blog post.
Thats nice. 2 Minutes still leave time to grab a new cup of coffee. When comparing this to 2 Socket UNIX systems a decade ago this is five to ten times faster.
Sorr, but that can not be true. Most of this time is used for hardware checking and not for loading Windows.
That’s the point of the blog post, the boot time of the server to get to OS loading. The speed of UEFI hardware checking has increased significantly and takes a lot lest time, so a server reboot from start to finish had decreased significantly when comparing R720 to R730 … The Windows improvement that could have come with “Soft Restart” in Windows 2016 seems no longer present in TPv2/TPv3 and it didn’t work in TPv1.