HP Microserver with multiple VM's

Fleety

Fleety

Fleety

Associate
Joined
7 Jul 2011
Posts
8
I'm looking at building a mini server for home use and these little boxes seem to tick all the boxes im just wondering if ill be asking too much of it.

The idea is to have it running 2k8 with hyper V. The host OS will also be a DC

For now the only VM's i can see it running 24hr are a win7vm for remote access/vpn diag while at work and then another VM running TS and a minecraft server.

In addition to this it will then also be used for hosting a couple more win7 vm's and 2k8 server vm's for testing and exam purposes as and when needed.

spec wise the microserver will have 8gb memory and initially 2x2tb drives.

How well do these boxes cope with multiple VM's?

Any feedback from people with one of these boxes would be great.
 
Get an ML110 G6 and beef it with 16GB RAM and an HP Quad NIC.

Kicks ass. CPU not up to the job on the Microserver tbh.

I have three ML110 G6 each with 16GB for my home lab, can run many many VM's.
 
I did look at the ml110 was just a little worried on the size/noise/power usage as it will be left on 24/7. The new acer ac100 spec seems quite interesting, no release date yet.
 
If you're going to be running Hyper-V on the physical box you can only run up to 4 VM's AFAIK using server 2008 R2 enterprise.

Datacenter edition allows unlimited VMs but you can only licence it on boxes that have 2 or more physical CPUs.
 
Fleety said:
I did look at the ml110 was just a little worried on the size/noise/power usage as it will be left on 24/7. The new acer ac100 spec seems quite interesting, no release date yet.
Click to expand...

Trust me. The ML110 G6 is virtually silent. The loudest thing in the machine is the WD 250Gb RE3 !!!

At startup its full bore fans for a few secs, but this can be turned off in the BIOS under "blow out feature". Perhaps this option was to blow out dust every time the server was hard rebooted. Quite clever really.

However with this turned off, the server slips stealthily on, and if you had a quieter hard drive (I think they now ship with Seagates, so perhaps) then you would be sorted.

I have three in my living room, and when they are all on the noise is there obviously with three machines, but its barely noticeable and definitely not anoyying.

The G7 has extra fans, but the G6 has one CPU fan, and one exhaust fan, and both run at low speed, unless ur in the Mohave Desert or somewhere!

I cant stand noise, but have no complaints at all about the ML110.

Ive beefed mine up with Quad Nics, and some P410 512MB RAID cards.

With some clever PCI-e arrangement, you can get the full bandwidth from the cards too.

I also believe there is a cashback offer on the G6 too.

In addition, the G6 has an ILO and you can do remote KVM via your browser and mount ISO's as boot discs etc. Its very cool, but its an ILO100 Advanced feature you normally pay for. However, I have some spare licences I might be able to let go for free.
 
Depends on what the vm's are doing tbh, put 4GB in mine and it's happy running a Server 2008 DC/DNS/DHCP VM on ESXi along with an Ubuntu File Server (6TB ZFS RAIDZ). Average cpu usage is under 5% but I am limited to around 60MB/s transfers to or from the file server, SAMBA overheads are just too much for it.
 
Zarf said:
Depends on what the vm's are doing tbh, put 4GB in mine and it's happy running a Server 2008 DC/DNS/DHCP VM on ESXi along with an Ubuntu File Server (6TB ZFS RAIDZ). Average cpu usage is under 5% but I am limited to around 60MB/s transfers to or from the file server, SAMBA overheads are just too much for it.
Click to expand...

I'm amazed that thing even runs.... ESXi uses around 2.2Gb memory, not sure exactly how much 2008 uses but on top of that ZFS is very memory intensive it's more likely that limiting your transfer speeds.

ZFS also doesn't like anything sitting between it and the disks it can't do a lot of the nice features like self healing and self scrubbing unless it has direct access.....
 
I upgraded mine to 4GB RAM and it's currently running ESXi with 4 VMs. 3 Windows 2003 Servers each with 1 GB RAM and 1 Win XP Client with 512MB RAM, currently hosting AD, DNS, DHCP and Exchange 2003 and it's all running quite smoothly.
 
Thejay said:
I'm amazed that thing even runs.... ESXi uses around 2.2Gb memory, not sure exactly how much 2008 uses but on top of that ZFS is very memory intensive it's more likely that limiting your transfer speeds.

ZFS also doesn't like anything sitting between it and the disks it can't do a lot of the nice features like self healing and self scrubbing unless it has direct access.....
Click to expand...

I was running for a few months with just Solaris, so it had 4GB RAM and direct access to the drives, speeds over Samba weren't a great deal better despite months spent tweaking. Disk benchmarks and iperf benchmarks showed no bottlenecks (and actually showed pretty much identical results between bare metal and VM versions)
Not sure why self healing etc wouldn't work, each physical drive has a data-store taking up the whole space, which is then mapped through to a virtual drive on the VM, I'm not mirroring at a lower level. If any drive is corrupted, that'll show up in the checksums on the corresponding virtual drive and ZFS can self heal.
 
Thanks for the replies. The size of the ML110 is a little too big for where it needs to go. I'll give a microserver a go and see how it stands up. Worst that can happen is that it replaces my Qnap NAS.
 
contracteur said:
If you're going to be running Hyper-V on the physical box you can only run up to 4 VM's AFAIK using server 2008 R2 enterprise.

Datacenter edition allows unlimited VMs but you can only licence it on boxes that have 2 or more physical CPUs.
Click to expand...

I think you've muddled this a bit, if you are running Hyper-V from within Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise then you can only run 4 virtualised 2008 R2 Enterprise VMs on the one licence. You can run as many virtual machines with different operating systems as you want.
 
GeX said:
I think you've muddled this a bit, if you are running Hyper-V from within Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise then you can only run 4 virtualised 2008 R2 Enterprise VMs on the one licence. You can run as many virtual machines with different operating systems as you want.
Click to expand...

Hyper-V isn't limited, it's the OS licensing that's limited. Enterprise = 4 virtual licenses, Datacentre is unlimited.
Also Datacentre is licensed per CPU socket. 1CPU is about £1800 2CPU is about £2400

Hence why everyone uses that on their VMWare/Hyper-v boxes, if you get about 6 or 7 VM's per box you start to save money :)
 
KVR1333D3E9S/4GHB or

KVR1333D3E9S/4G


They have moved over to Elpida chips now, but if you order with the HB, you are guaranteed Hynix, which is what I prefer, as all my servers have matched RAM.

This is SUPER CHEAP, and very high quality. DDR3, ECC, Thermal Sensor, lifetime warranty, proper stuff and you cannot go wrong.

I wouldnt touch anything else, not even HP RAM, as its always from a different manufacturer. So get a few sticks, some is Samsung, some is Micron etc etc..

Totally ridiculous. Get a shedload of it now, before RAM goes up in price.

4 x 4Gb modules will nicely max out the G6 to its 16GB limit.

Job done!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom