HP ProLiant MicroServer owners' thread

tamasrepus said:
In case others are looking for more info… I've both a decent set of pictures (better than what's already on the Internet, IMHO) , as well as my own hardware review.

Working on a software review… I'm running Debian GNU/Linux off an 8 GB flash drive on my N36L.
Click to expand...
Nice pics and info, thanks. Probably worth adding 'MicroServer' after 'ProLiant' on your pages (cos that's what the thing is called :) ) to make the pages more easily Googlable.

Andy
 
ahmhardforumahm said:
Nice pics and info, thanks. Probably worth adding 'MicroServer' after 'ProLiant' on your pages (cos that's what the thing is called :) ) to make the pages more easily Googlable.
Click to expand...
Done — Thanks! The photos have been around for a few weeks and I think are already in Google's first page of results.
 
tamasrepus said:
Whatever was on sale at Newegg… which happened to be the G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333.

Like I mention in the review, I had to remove the heatsinks to make them fit in the case. The heatsinks were so easy to remove, there's no way it could have been effective in the first place. I think the adhesive on your average sticker is stickier.
Click to expand...
That's good to know - I'll keep the heatsinks in mind.

I was under the impression that you needed ECC - but I guess not, considering the memory you're using above isn't ECC. Makes me want to buy one sooner now that I know I don't have to pay for ECC memory.
 
Hi guys,

I've been testing the microserver on Windows 2008 R2 and freenas.

I want to use in the near future 4x2TB disks in ZFS raidz1 using the samsungs F4 5400rpm, and finally take away the massive storage that I have on my workstation and leave it running only on the intel x25-v raid 0 array.

Now I've taken 4x maxtors 250GB from a diber optic SAN at my work place to test on the microserver.

Using Windows 2008 R2 in raid 5, I was able to reach 160MB sec read and 48MB sec write sequential speeds
in raid 0, I managed to get 240MB read and 240MB write.
These maxtor disks are slow, they don't do more the 60MB read/write in a single drive
Attention to write cache that was enabled on raid 5 and raid 0 tests, so if power is lost, data can be damaged.
I don't have a gigabit switch at home now to test the network speed, but I'll add this during the week as soon I get the gigabit switch.

Now I'm testing freenas on it using raidz1 array of 4x250GB maxtor drives and so far it looks fine. I'm not sure yet how to benchmark the speed of the disks on the freenas itselft without involving the network. I would like to run a test like crystal disk mark to test only sequential read/write as this microserver will only store very large video files.
Do you guys know a way to test the disk speed on freenas?

In the end of the week I should have 4x2TB samsung F4 5400rpm running on it, so the performance number should be a lot better. These disks alone can do easily 110MB sec read speed and 90-100MB writes.

Other thing about this microserver, it is really silent. Not dead silent, but it is really pleasant to have a proper PC on it running so quiet. It is a lot better then a NAS only device, so in the future if I need I can use Windows 2008 and a terminal server on it, AD and several other things. Very useful!

Also, because I'm in UK, HP is offering until 31st december a cash back of £100. I paid £212 for mine delivered and will take back £100 of this. Seriously, where in earth would you get only the case with the caddies and a hotswap SATA backplate for £100? so for £112 you get the whole system, 1GB of DDR3 and a 160GB harddisk.

By the way, the 160GB seagate drive that comes with it is really fast, I believe only 1 plate. It does 115MB sec sequential reads.
 
Tested NexentaStor Community Edition over the weekend and I do not recommend it. Which it installs and works fine it is ridiculously slow. The processor is always at 95% used and writes are about 15MB/s.
 
Well, so far freenas didn't impress me performance wise. I've just tried on a VM running on a dual [email protected] with 3 drives that alone are capable of 100MB sec read/write each, so raid1z in the VM using 1 virtual disk in each physical disk gave me no more than 35-40MB sec write speeds. even on raid 0 it doesn't go more than 45-50MB sec. Really strange but it does't look like that SMB is the issue, I think is freenas :/

Well, I need to wait for the gigabit switch arrive to test the stuff properly.
 
How would it preform with included drive as a os-drive + 4x2tb 5400rpm disks in zfs raidz2?
The dream is a noroco 4220 filled with hardware porn, but since my wallet is limited this looks very interesting.

I want to use it as a movie/tv-series storage server, 720/1080p, host a very small wordpress blogg, http, ftp.

Is this my best buy?
 
I'm running Debian GNU/Linux (AMD64) with 4x 7200 RPM 500 GB disks (I initially bought 4x 2 TB disks, but decided to use them elsewhere) in Linux software RAID 5.

I haven't setup any NAS-type software or file sharing, but I've no problem maxing out the Gigabit Ethernet rsyncing things to and from the machine. I wasn't expecting more than that for $300, a generic netbook CPU, and 30 W at idle. Keep some perspective, guys!
 
I have been checking into this platform and am definitely interested in picking up a few for some testing, but am curious is these things have drivers for either XP or Win7.

Anyone have any ideas?
 
dasboot said:
How would it preform with included drive as a os-drive + 4x2tb 5400rpm disks in zfs raidz2?
The dream is a noroco 4220 filled with hardware porn, but since my wallet is limited this looks very interesting.

I want to use it as a movie/tv-series storage server, 720/1080p, host a very small wordpress blogg, http, ftp.

Is this my best buy?
Click to expand...

That was my config - a 40GB 2.5" drive for the OS and 4x 2TB Hitachi drives for the ZFS pool with 1 drive as parity. 15-20MB/s writes.

I gave up and put WHS v1 on it.
 
tamasrepus said:
I'm running Debian GNU/Linux (AMD64) with 4x 7200 RPM 500 GB disks (I initially bought 4x 2 TB disks, but decided to use them elsewhere) in Linux software RAID 5.

I haven't setup any NAS-type software or file sharing, but I've no problem maxing out the Gigabit Ethernet rsyncing things to and from the machine. I wasn't expecting more than that for $300, a generic netbook CPU, and 30 W at idle. Keep some perspective, guys!
Click to expand...

what protocols? from where to where?
I've tested quite a lot software raid 5 and so far not even close to gbit speed
 
mephistopoa said:
what protocols? from where to where?
I've tested quite a lot software raid 5 and so far not even close to gbit speed
Click to expand...
As I mentioned, rsync, unencrypted. Downloading a few multi-gigabyte files from the N36L to a laptop with an Intel X25-M SSD. Filesystem on the N36L was XFS setup on Linux software RAID 5 device w/ a v1.2 superblock. Laptop was ext4. In case it isn't obvious, in no way was I attempting to perform a statistically valid benchmark.

I guess I should qualify "Gigabit" speeds — I think I was getting 80-90 MiB/sec? The limiting factor may be the laptop. Gigabit's Ethernet's theoretical maximum is 119 MiB/sec. Unfortunately no hardware I've owned has ever gone anywhere near that fast.
 
Anyone have any idea what kind of performance people are getting?

If anyone has any numbers or links where it is Windows 2008 + 4 SATA drives on a RAID card - I'd be interesting in knowing them.
 
Well I don't use RAID but 2K8 R2 or WHS v1 with 4 Hitachi 2TB drives I get 80-90MB/s write speed for large HD files.
 
danman said:
That was my config - a 40GB 2.5" drive for the OS and 4x 2TB Hitachi drives for the ZFS pool with 1 drive as parity. 15-20MB/s writes.
Click to expand...
Maybe the Advanced Format HDDs (4k Bytes sector size vs. 512 Bytes) are the reason for this low rate? See Hitachi Advanced Format Drives for details.

For optimum performance, it is important to ensure that the drive is partitioned correctly and that data is written in 4K Byte blocks by both the operating system, and the application. Modern operating systems handle this automatically. When using Advanced Format drives in legacy environments, special tools may be required to optimize read/write performance and keep the data sectors aligned. Users who have created a misaligned partition may download the Windows utility below to correct this condition by re-aligning the partition.
Click to expand...

With kind regards
Joe
 
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has anyone done any hd-benchmarks for ex. via bonnie with this Micro Server and 2/4/8 GB RAM on NexentaCore or Solaris Express 11 with Raid 1 and Raid-Z1?

If these values are not too bad, i will recommend this server as the most interesting entry-level and free home ZFS-solution together with Nexentacore/ OpenIndiana/ SE11 + my free web-GUI napp-it

The HP Proliant seems to work out of the box without serious problems with these systems.

gea
 
has anyone done any hd-benchmarks for ex. via bonnie with this Micro Server and 2/4/8 GB RAM on NexentaCore or Solaris Express 11 with Raid 1 and Raid-Z1?

If these values are not too bad, i will recommend this server as the most interesting entry-level and free home ZFS-solution together with Nexentacore/ OpenIndiana/ SE11 + my free web-GUI napp-it

The HP Proliant seems to work out of the box without serious problems with these systems.

gea
Click to expand...

I've been playing around, first time with Opensolaris and ZFS also using napp-it, so if you're the author - Cheers!. I'm using 2* 2tb Samsung F4's in a mirror.
Speeds on the device itself are what I expected :
Code: 
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        tank        ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c4t0d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c4t1d0  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

root@openindiana:/tank/testdir# dd if=/dev/zero of=zerofile.000 bs=10M count=3200
3200+0 records in
3200+0 records out
33554432000 bytes (34 GB) copied, 345.481 s, 97.1 MB/s
root@openindiana:/tank/testdir# dd if=zerofile.000 of=/dev/zero bs=10M
3200+0 records in
3200+0 records out
33554432000 bytes (34 GB) copied, 171.858 s, 195 MB/s
If it makes any difference, I used the ashift=12 zpool binary for creation since these are 4K drives, then moved back to the unmodified one.

Raw Network performance with the onboard gigabit also seems fine:

opensolaris.jpg


Unfortunately, so far this isn't translating to good file sharing performance ... both SMB and iSCSI with my Windows clients is disappointing. I'm getting around 25MB/s reads, 45MB/s writes over ISCSI, and 20MB/s reads, 40MB/s Writes over SMB. CPU usage not an issue on the microserver, neither core was maxed out.
I get much better speeds from the same machine with my Windows 2003 file server, ~100MB/s reads and writes.

Some brief testing with my mums macbook was getting much better speeds, 80MB/s reads, 40MB/s Writes on iSCSI (globalsan initiator) and an decent 95MB/s reads, 60MB/s writes using AFP. Will test with NFS once I figure out how to get it working.
I think the write speeds being lower across the board is some kind of issue with Nagles algorithm, since the network and drives are obviously capable of around 95MB/s. will be playing around with this later.


Does anyone else have any ideas for improving performance? Is the iSCSI initiator for windows poor?
This microserver is serving as kind of a trial run with ZFS for me, getting iSCSI working at full potential would be enough for now so that I can offload some files from my Windows file server and free up some space, but eventually I'd like to move all my storage onto ZFS in a large 16+drive system and having good (>90MB/s on large files) SMB performance is important to me.
 
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I had the same poor SMB performance with Nexenta and this box. It was my first try with ZFS so I figured I just 'did it wrong'. In my case, writes were between 15-20 MB/s.
 
ZFS is a high-end solution. Although you could run a CLI-based 64bit Nexenta* or Solaris Express with <1GB RAM (Web-GUI does not matter), i found a huge performance increase especially with wd-green drives when i added more RAM. If you have RAM, you may check the difference between 2, 4 or 8 GB.

Also ZFS needs CPU-Power especially with ZFS-RaidZ, Compress, Dedup or Encryption. Disable these for max performance and use RAID-1.

Then ZFS is developed for maximal data-security with Copy on Write and Synchronous file system transactions cached to a log device. Although this is good to security and allows unlimited snapshots without delay, it costs performance. With newer ZFS-versions, you could disable ZFS-sync property for max. performance. (with my current napp-it via web-gui see http://www.napp-it.org/pop11_en.html in menue folder). Or use a SSD Write Cache for ZIL.

To increase Performance, you may add a SSD Read Cache Drive

For max. performance:
use CLI-based NexentaCore or Solaris Express 11 (Web-Gui does not need RAM)
use 4 or 8GB RAM, (ECC not needed but recommended)
Use Raid -1
Do not use 4k Drives
Disable Sync (ZFS property)
Disable atime (ZFS property, logs time of last file-access)
Add a SSD Read Cache (50GB Sandforce or OCZ Revo) = Hybrid-Storage

Gea
 
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Cheers, Gea.
I have 4GB ram on order, and I am already running with a RAID1. I'm also using 4K drives but have done the ashift=12 fix.

My main problem is that SMB performance is poor, I was watching the CPU usage on the microserver during transfers and it wasn't bottlenecking there. Has anyone seen good SMB performance from a ZFS supporting OS? I want to eventually move from my current Perc5 RAID5 setup on windows to a ZFS pool of mirrored pairs (on a much more powerful system), but If I'm not going to get good Gigabit iSCSI or SMB performance on my Windows clients there's no point.

iSCSI was also much better on my mums Macbook, Is this a limitation of the windows/starwind initiators, or something else? Sharing with the AFP protocol was the only one that came close to the performance I want.
 
_Gea said:
ZFS is a high-end solution. Although you could run a CLI-based 64bit Nexenta* or Solaris Express with <1GB RAM (Web-GUI does not matter), i found a huge performance increase especially with wd-green drives when i added more RAM. If you have RAM, you may check the difference between 2, 4 or 8 GB.

Also ZFS needs CPU-Power especially with ZFS-RaidZ, Compress, Dedup or Encryption. Disable these for max performance and use RAID-1.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I set it up with RaidZ, dedup, and compression. That's probably why the perf sucked. As for HW:

4 Hitachi 2TB 7200 RPM drives
4 GB ECC RAM
Intel PCIe NIC, onboard disabled
 
well, if it helps I've tried freenas and so far the smb performance was poor, not sure if was because of smb 1
on 2008 r2 using smb 2.1 I manage to achieve 115MB sec without jumbo frames
I'm not sure if the bsd implementation of smb works fast natively, but to be honest zfs on freenas is not that good as well.
 
i have not done smb performance tests but i can say, it feels as good as with my 2003/2008 server - even better - less problems about path length, permissions, viruses, uptime and better features like snapshots and online-filecheck (scrubbing). i have switched all our file-servers from windows to nexenta
(about 500 user/students)

smb is slower than iscsi or afp but i have not ever heard about general limits. you need more power to achieve the same performance. with modern hardware, enough ram and striped mirrors, it should not be a problem to have >= 90MB/s for a single user.

see also the following benchmarks and look at the difference between smb,afp and iscsi.
http://harryd71.blogspot.com/2010/05/freenas-vs-nexentastor.html

gea
 
Cliff Couser said:
can someone with WHS installed, give some benchmarks please.

thanks!
Click to expand...
I'm a little confused with the obsession with benchmarking in this thread.

Yes, it's a netbook CPU, but file serving is completely I/O bound. And unless you're using the included 160 GB disk, the system is a "barebones" unit and whatever performance you get is dependent on what you put into it. Someone else's numbers are meaningless.
 
Would anyone happen to know how to tune the cifs/smb parameters on Solaris Express / OpenIndiana? I know the parameters I want to tune -

max xmit = 65536,
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_SNDBUF=65535 SO_RCVBUF=65535, block size=4096

With Samba it's just a case of editing the smb.conf file, but since SMB sharing seems to be built into Solaris now I've no idea where to edit these parameters in. Does it even use configuration files any more?

TIA


I'm a little confused with the obsession with benchmarking in this thread.

Yes, it's a netbook CPU, but file serving is completely I/O bound. And unless you're using the included 160 GB disk, the system is a "barebones" unit and whatever performance you get is dependent on what you put into it. Someone else's numbers are meaningless.
Click to expand...
Not really, many of us are finding that rather than being I/O bound, we need network and SMB protocol tuning to get to be serving at anywhere close to the disks capabilities. This is applicable to a lot of people since even the standard 160GB is capable of much better performance than the 30-40MB/s you get on an untuned setup.
 
I've just ordered this little server. Im going to upgrade RAM to 4gb and use 4x2tb WD Green drives. Im going to use it as a NAS for HD video streaming (1080p and remuxes) to mac and pc, photo storage, iTunes library and torrent client.

I thought of installing FreeNAS on it as an all-in-one solution. But recent posts concerning slow smb transfer speeds got me thinking again about it.
Are there any tuning that should be done to recent Freenas builds for it maintain good transfer speeds?

And also what file system should I use: ufs or zfs? I thought of using all the space of hdd's (8tb) for my purposes so Im not that afraid if one of the drives fails. But I also don't want to lose everything because of one drive.

Sorry for these newbie questions, but I thought it's the place to ask.
 
This post is to provide some example statistics maybe useful for others.

1. The Host is Pentium 4 2.8GHz with Hyperthreading. Fedora 13 Samba 1GB ECC RAM. 1-OS Disk. 2x500GB SATA-16MB WD Blue configured as mdadm RAID-1. Built-In Intel Gb NIC. Multiusers. Test done live with minimal user activities.

2. The client is Windows 7 Q8400 OEM machine. Onboard Intel Gb NIC

3. Copy iso file from Windows 7 to Linux Samba Host RAID-1 data volume. Copy 1.2GB single file to overwhelm the cache on host (entire host system has only 1GB memory) Monitor Network Statistics on Windows 7 Task manager Networking Tab. On maximum it can hit 69-82%. Deducts other overheads, it should still hit 80-90MB/s reasonably well.

Observation : Pentium 4 HT Host is able to sustain SAMBA traffics 80-90MB/s for short to medium burst transfer. Components involved are all conventional items easily available. adjust your configuration to achieve reasonable performance.

Thus, given careful fine-tuning, I believe this HP micro server with slightly updated more modern hardware specification should be able to meet the goal of basic file server duty.
 
I wanted to say thanks for all the info about this server. Im glad to find out that I will not need to buy ECC ram.

I was looking to get this to be a small win2k8 server/nas and then get another larger hp server to become a esx box for me.

This looks like this will work great.
 
Guys just a heads up for someone willing to use as a media center

With a ATI HD 4550 it plays nice 1080p mkv videos vido hardware acceleration

I've built one for a friend, so has 10TB of storage, virtually silent and plays HD movies fine.

Another way to use this best buy! shame the £100 cashback ends tomorrow here in UK
 
lightp2 said:
This post is to provide some example statistics maybe useful for others.

1. The Host is Pentium 4 2.8GHz with Hyperthreading. Fedora 13 Samba 1GB ECC RAM. 1-OS Disk. 2x500GB SATA-16MB WD Blue configured as mdadm RAID-1. Built-In Intel Gb NIC. Multiusers. Test done live with minimal user activities.

2. The client is Windows 7 Q8400 OEM machine. Onboard Intel Gb NIC

3. Copy iso file from Windows 7 to Linux Samba Host RAID-1 data volume. Copy 1.2GB single file to overwhelm the cache on host (entire host system has only 1GB memory) Monitor Network Statistics on Windows 7 Task manager Networking Tab. On maximum it can hit 69-82%. Deducts other overheads, it should still hit 80-90MB/s reasonably well.

Observation : Pentium 4 HT Host is able to sustain SAMBA traffics 80-90MB/s for short to medium burst transfer. Components involved are all conventional items easily available. adjust your configuration to achieve reasonable performance.

Thus, given careful fine-tuning, I believe this HP micro server with slightly updated more modern hardware specification should be able to meet the goal of basic file server duty.
Click to expand...

on a Win 2008 server using SMB 2 it can do 115MB/sec, I've tested already. Freenas has a crappy SMB transfers so far I've tested. If you want to use NTFS because of the permissions, freenas is just out of the game for now.

I've played with ZFS and so far on this specific machine for a media server doesn't add anything. ZFS would be used better in another environment that really needs data redundancy
 
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