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

steinooo said:
WOW! nice one! I'd be very interested to hear about your findings with jumbo frames. How many discs have you got, and which discs are they out of interest? Also what and how do you go about apportioning disc space to the ZFS VM?
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I have 4 Samsung F4 2TB's, and the 250GB drive that came with the microserver. ESXi boots from an internal USB stick, The VMs main virtual drives and configs are kept on the 250GB (think I gave solaris about 16GB and Server 2008 30GB), and each 2TB Samsung has a datastore taking up the whole drive. These four datastores are then presented as additional virtual drives to my Solaris VM.

Can't wait for my resistors to arrive and get stuck into the real networking side with teaming and a proper storage VLAN with jumbo frames.

I'm currently backing up most of my primary Server 2003 NAS onto the Solaris ZFS VM, before undertaking converting that box over to ESXi as well. It's running on an Nforce 570 so no idea how well it's going to go or whether i'll be able to pass my Perc 5/i through (I'm hoping to convert my Server 2003 install to a VM and then pass the Perc back to it and access the NTFS array without loss, but backing up to be safe)
 
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success sata enclosure used and I have all 6 ports working now rather than just the 5 just need to success WHS on external sata now.
 
Well I was just about to order a DS211J NAS and 2x 2tb WD Caviar Green hard drives, but I guess for the same price I could get one of these and it would be much better value? Do I need to get anything else to go with this, I see people have talked about RAM upgrades? Will it be able to stream mkv files to my PS3?
 
fish said:
better to stream mp4 files mate not mkv
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Ah right. Think I might have a lot of encoding to do then! Is that because the PS3 can play the mp4 files without having to transcode them (i.e. I wouldn't need PS3 media server running on the server?). Sorry if this is a stupid question!
 
PlanetGong said:
Do I need to get anything else to go with this, I see people have talked about RAM upgrades?
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Depends...

What OS are you going to install?
What drives are you going to install?
What are you planning on using it for?
What (if any) other hardware will you be connecting to it?

I have purchased a single 4gb ddr3 stick for it, giving me 5gb total, and an extra 2tb hdd as I will need to leave one in my NAS to sell it.. Probably going to start with VSphere on mine, with Vista and ReadyNAS as VM's...

Sam
 
samcat said:
Depends...

What OS are you going to install? Was thinking WHS as assumed it would be simple as I'm used to windows.
What drives are you going to install? 2x2tb for now
What are you planning on using it for? Media streaming to ps3, file sharing, newsgroup downloads
What (if any) other hardware will you be connecting to it? None

I have purchased a single 4gb ddr3 stick for it, giving me 5gb total, and an extra 2tb hdd as I will need to leave one in my NAS to sell it.. Probably going to start with VSphere on mine, with Vista and ReadyNAS as VM's...

Sam
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See above.
 
PlanetGong said:
Ah right. Think I might have a lot of encoding to do then! Is that because the PS3 can play the mp4 files without having to transcode them (i.e. I wouldn't need PS3 media server running on the server?). Sorry if this is a stupid question!
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Using windows 7 and whs any shared folder I have with mp files in it the ps3 and Sony bluray player I have see the files and will happily stream them with no media server runnig like you say. I have not noticed any difference in video quality( if there is any) it just looks like the audio encoding is different in both formats.
I believe that he xboc 360 is happy streaming mp4s also but I may be wrong
 
In mine i currently have 4x1TB drives, My OS is currently debian6 using linux raid 5. 1GB Ram.

Looking to get another one which i will fill with 8GB ram and 4x2TB for esxi...

What is the cheapest ESXi compatible SATA raid card you can get....
 
I have a spare ssd drive, would it be beneficial to use that as my os drive, and then 2x2tb as storage drives? Also will any kind of ram be ok?
 
As a follow up, Jumbo Frames made no real difference (none of the VMWare Virtual Nics for Solaris even support it, but benchmarking against my Server 2008 VM showed very little difference (1-2MB/s)).
NIC teaming on the microserver hasn't made any difference yet either, it's possible i've set it up wrong, but failover works fine. Transfers (going by the activity lights) only seem to use one at a time rather than load balancing.
 
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steinooo said:
have you tried VMXNET vNICs?
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Using Vmxnet3, but e1000 doesnt support jumbo frames either.
having seen the minor differences it makes when I benched using my server 2008 VM I'm not that fussed.

I did some more testing with NIC teaming on the ESXi box and it does seem to be working properly, managed to get 1.5Gb/s when benching from two other networked PCs at the same time. It apparently doesn't split a single stream unless it saturates one of the links -this is to avoid packets arriving out of order which incurs buffering for reassembly.
 
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