Good Cheap Server - HP Proliant Microserver 4 BAY - OWNERS THREAD

By the way, there is a BIOS option to change the RAM allocation for the Video Card.

Anyway, been playing around with this all evening, set up a ZFS pool with my drives in a mirror config. As I get more drives I'll keep adding two drive mirrors to the pool, ZFS stripes across all the mirrors RAID10 style. Until RAIDZ supports online capacity expansion mirrors are the easiest way to manage future capacity upgrades.

Impressed by the performance so far, Disk performance is great with ZFS reading data from both mirrors.
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
[B]33554432000 bytes (34 GB) copied, 345.481 s, 97.1 MB/s[/B]
root@openindiana:/tank/testdir# dd if=zerofile.000 of=/dev/zero bs=10M
3200+0 records in
3200+0 records out
[B]33554432000 bytes (34 GB) copied, 171.858 s, 195 MB/s[/B]

Raw network performance is also good:
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 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 awesome 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.
 
Last edited:
Really tempted by one of these, but I was wondering if anyone could chuck a copy of PS3mediaserver on it and see how it copes transcoding a 1080p MKV to the PS3?

If it works ok would be tempting to get shot of my big PC

Thanks

Kimbie
 
Finally given in and ordered one after 3 days of indecision! I've been looking at a NAS/Server for the house for about 6 months and this seems perfect for the money, nice low power box to serve files and backup important stuff. Now I just need to familiarise myself with WHS!
 
I've just given up and installed XP Pro. I'm sure it'll be more than suitable for my uses, and just can't be bothered trying to learn a new O/S!
 
Ive got Server 2008 R2 running nicely on mine :D

stuck a blu ray drive in it and encoding on the fly is fine.

Ive got 4gb ram in mine the dual core 1.3 seems to cope ok with the load sat at about 97% load converting to MKV cpu has hit max 42 degrees so far and its been going about 2 hours.
 
CraigN said:
Ive got Server 2008 R2 running nicely on mine :D

stuck a blu ray drive in it and encoding on the fly is fine.

Ive got 4gb ram in mine the dual core 1.3 seems to cope ok with the load sat at about 97% load converting to MKV cpu has hit max 42 degrees so far and its been going about 2 hours.
Click to expand...

Hmm well if it can handle that maybe it will be ok for transcoding to a PS3?

Kimbie
 
Mine arrived today, Ive installed Freenas onto an internal USB drive I put in but havent configured anything else yet. Initially, Im really impressed by this, its neat, compact, and almost silent - albeit with only 1 internal drive, I expect noise to increase when I put my 4 x 1TB drives in it. Seems like a steal at the price so far tbh.
 
EvilGrin said:
Hey mate, on the form for the Company Name and Address, how did you fill it out? (Presuming you purchased it as an individual that is...)
Click to expand...

The cheque is addressed to the company, so state your name! I sent mine off last Friday, was processed successfully by Wednesday. Guess the cheque is in the post :p
 
Gundam God said:
HMm I put N/A in company name field. They have my name above it so shouldn't be a problem right?
I guess if it is and they want a name they can always email me for one.
Click to expand...

The company name part is who they make the cheque payable, you might be ok but they could be piccy, either way they will let you know, and if the forms incorrect just submit a new one.
 
Mikey said:
As per the Tech Heads VMWare site I'm I've ordered mine for a vSphere box :)

Paid £259 for mine then take £100 cashback off.

Includes 4GB RAM, DVD and USB for ESX embedded
Click to expand...

Hi mate - I saw this on that site too, its been there for a little while but I could never make my mind up wether I wanted to go ahead with my AMD X6 system (8GB of RAM etc etc) or pick up that system.

How is it for Vsphere? have you used it yet? would be interested in what you think, I would probably be running about 4 Linux based hosts on it, 1xmonitoring, 1xMySQL server (light load), 1xWebServer and 1xDNS

Cheers
 
dragonuk said:
So whats better WHS v1 or the WHS Vail Beta at the moment it still has drive extender :P.

So is drive extender like a software raid ? Whats it sort of equivilant to ? Raid 5 ?

And WHS v1 used to write everything to the system drive first and then copy it to the pool. I dont think it does that now though. Is that right ?
Click to expand...

Like RAID1 but unstead of mirroring whole drives it will only mirror folders you specifie.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom