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I have HP workstation Z440 : Xeon W3520 and I want to make on it Ubuntu server. Is it compatible? thank you.

Kati Dev
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1 Answers1

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Probably. The CPU is not that useful to know - all modern CPU's work just fine with whatever you throw at them. For a server the following is important:

  • Supported disk controller.
  • Supported network cards.
  • Supported chip set.

HP has an affinity for Broadcom NIC's. I'm not terribly fond of BCM, but they tend to work just fine. Anyway, a gigabit Intel NIC costs you ~20-30$, and will work flawlessly. So this is not much of a worry in my opinion.

The real kicker here is the disk controller. HP lists the following options:

  • Integrated SATA 6.0 Gb/s;
  • LSI MegaRAID® 9270-8i SAS 6.0 Gb/s ROC RAID Card and iBBU09 Battery Backup Unit (optional); LSI 9217-4i4e
  • 8-port SAS 6.0 Gb/s RAID (optional);
  • Factory integrated RAID available for SATA/SAS drives (RAID 0, 0 Data, 1, and 10);
  • Factory integrated RAID available for PCIe SSDs (RAID 0 Data)

The Integrated SATA is probably a standard Intel chipset SATA port, and will probably work just fine, and can be used with Linux Software raid for multiple drives.

The Megaraid 9270 appears to be fairly well supported as well.

Regarding the three last options, they are not specific, and may or may not be fake-raid / software raid. In this case - use the builtin Intel SATA ports and Linux software raid if you desire redundancy options.

So overall: Yes, it will probably run Linux. The easiest way to figure out how well is probably to install Ubuntu. Note what's not working properly, and find a solution for the problems that arise.

vidarlo
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