Just some ramblings. Some months ago when I started the journey of upgrading my M4 series to M5 I also expanded to 4 nodes (I was planning on moving from vSAN OSA to vSAN ESA, and the, well I’ll talk about that in another post), I was ordering parts and by mistake ordered one bezel — I loved the way the one looked. I ordered another bezel for the c220 M5 and when they were racked above each other — they looked GREAT. So I started looking at bezels for the c240 M5. What a shock I was in for! They were between $150-$250. I even asked a company about it, and the only thing they stated was, the M5, specifically the HyperFlex models were in HIGH demand and the price was higher. This is when the c220 M5 bezel was no more than $50.
As I seem to do nightly, I was looking at eBay and I saw a bezel for the c240 listed for $49. But I kept putting it off. I had already decided I was not going to get any more bezels, not paying $150-250 per bezel. Every day I looked at this, and just said nah, maybe tomorrow. Well, tomorrow came, I found the listing, clicked ‘Buy it Now’ and received the message ‘Item no longer available’. It had just sold. I was so mad at myself, I even contacted the seller to see if just by chance they had more.
So I was looking, adjusting how I searched, and low and behold a listing popped up for a “74-119561-02 Cisco 2U Front Bezel”. When I looked at a close-up of the pictures, they had a tag on it stating “Part CS-HX240C-M5SX” Which I know is the C240 M5 HyperFlex model. Checking that specific part number doesn’t bring up the bezel, but the photo looked right. I’ve seen 2, one says ‘ALL FLASH’, the other says nothing. This said nothing. I took the gamble, purchased, and when it arrived I could not believe me luck.
I say you would not believe my luck because, if you only knew the deals I’ve gotten while doing my M4->M5 upgrade, you would not believe it. But now that I know this is the right one, I have a choice to make.
The plan is to upgrade everything the M5 line. I can’t afford the M6 or M7 (not that I’ve seen any on the used market, guess 3rd generation scalable’s are not really being refreshed yet). I know a secret regarding ordering Cisco UCS servers. Maybe I’ll share once I’m done upgrading. Reason to check back later :). Seriously, I’m writing this mainly for me. I wanted to start writing my journeys down. want my compute cluster to be all Intel Scalable processor’s, and while all Cascade Lake would be GREAT, once I finally upgrade the last m4, it will be a Skylake.
But now I want everything to have bezels! I just love the way they look in my cabinet. I said before I didn’t care about the cosmetics, but damn it, I do! Now I want all bezels, and I think it’s time to stop cheating. I currently have 2 of my servers in the cabinet via their sliding rails. Everything else is sitting on shelves. That will change. First Bezels, then all M5’s, then sliding rails. Putting everything on rails also has the added benefit of freeing up rack space. Which will let me either add some rack mounted UPS’, or maybe a Rack AC unit? Why AC Unit. That’s also a future post.
