Opinions on HP ProLiant ML115 G5

Origin said:
If you find somewhere advertising that price then snap their hand off ;)
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LOL

pinkegobox said:
Thanks for that. I'm thinking that I might pick one up for myself if I can find one sub-£200 as a nice file server for home. I hope they're quiet!

Even at £350 I'm going to recommend it to the hospital radio station, it seems like a great bit of kit.

Cheers!
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The first 30seconds of boot it sounds like a jumbo jet taking off but after the monitoring software has initialized, it settles to a very quiet hum.

CraigN said:
has anyoen got the onboard raid controller working in Vmware ESXi.

Im running the latest version off usb internal port and its working sweet apart from the driver for the internal raid adaptor.

i have a nice raid 5 i want to use as storage but it wont see it.
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The onboard RAID controller doesn't work with ESXi last I checked.

HarryPainful said:
Exactly.

So send some links as we cannot find it!!
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Cant post links here as they are competitors. Keep an eye on stock levels though, a certain server website is expecting stock in 2 weeks and they have the 115 priced at £158. The price could change when they receive the new stock though.
 
CraigN said:
has anyoen got the onboard raid controller working in Vmware ESXi.

Im running the latest version off usb internal port and its working sweet apart from the driver for the internal raid adaptor.

i have a nice raid 5 i want to use as storage but it wont see it.
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If yours is the same as mine, and has the Nvidia chipset, then nope, it's not really a true hardware RAID card, and even if it was fully featured it's performance isn't great. I went for an E200 RAID card and hung some SATAs off it (note you have to buy the SATA cables separately). Used VMWare converter to import my home exchange and file servers to VMs and they run a treat (8Gb RAM). Currently got Server 2008 running on a separate VM, and will be upgrading to Exchange 2007 shortly.

If you do go this route for VMs, note ESXi still has some of ESX's odd behaviour with SMP systems. Mine ran like a dog for ages until I realised it was doing the same as some of our servers at work on a VI3 cluster. The VM reported no CPU activity but the physical CPUs were thrashing away at 100%. Reducing to one VCPU and changing the HAL to Uniprocessor in the VM solved the issue instantly (take a snapshot before you do this just in case). So for the moment I'd recommend you run all servers with a single VCPU. There's little performance benefit to having 2 VCPUs anyway in my experiments, especially in a dual core machine.

Overall, an excellent home VM setup for not a massive amount of cash.
 
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#Chri5# said:
Our ML115 works fine on the internal SATA controller but we are using single disks ie no-RAID.
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That may be the answer. I just checked in the VI Client and the MCP55 storage adaptor is showing up fine. This lends weight to the assumption that the stock controller works fine as long as ESXi is running, it just wont boot from it (leading to ML115 users setting up ESXi to boot from a USB stick, something that I could never get working). I might hang a couple of disks off the controller in RAID1 and see if I can utilise them in ESXi to verify that.
 
Looks like all of these have gone on the web now - I am just after one of the cheaper £100 ones.

If anyone does happen to know of stock anywhere I would be everly grateful : adam @ gogetta . co . uk
 
HP ProLiant ML110 (G5) Micro ATX Tower Server (1P) Xeon Dual Core (3065) 2.33GHz 1GB 250GB DVD-RW (Integrated Graphics)

is available at £174.92 inc. VAT
 
Nice one C, won't ask anymore questions on Ram now promise!

Got mine running with server 2008, running pretty slow as only has 512mb of ram currently. Got a nice usable 1.6TB of storage now.

Just my VMWare to setup and an application to stream to PS3 to go and joobs a good un!
 
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Hey no probs bud, ask away!

One of my VMs is 2003 Server R2 running Tversity, and as media file storage. Runs like a charm streaming to the PS3. Dead easy to set up too.
 
Sounds good. Just installed Tversity, need to have a play.

Have you tried streaming Blu-Ray films too it? Have Gladiators/Dark Knight/Iron Man ready to stream and hoping Tversity will handle this? Thought 500GB for films would last long but at 10GB a film may have to upgrade soon Doh!
 
Yeah i have it working on the internal sata controller fine just not when i raid it.

I whacked 4 x 500gb samsungs in it for storage and set a 1.36tb raid 5 and in vmware it just reported one 496gb drive. I Have two fo these so for this particular storage server i went back to just running windows standalone on it as i just want it for media storage.
 
Got one of the 115 a few months ago and have upgraded it to run with 8GB Kingston DDR2 and 4x1.5TB Seagates (RAID-5, onboard controller) using OpenSuse 11.1. I currently use it as a NAS with Mediatomb serving my PS3 without any problems.

I would like to try out OpenSolaris and run RAID-Z, but the Nvidia chip set won't allow an install, even though this was supposed to have been sorted. Anybody got OpenSolaris/ZFS running on it?
 
CGrieves said:
Hmm it appears some people have got the ML115 onboard disk controller to work with ESXi. Not sure if that's because newer ESXi installations support it, or because there are so many different configs of ML115 out there. Either way I could never get mine to work, but you could do worse than try the guide here:

http://www.techhead.co.uk/installing-vmware-esx-and-esxi-35-on-an-hp-proliant-ml115-g5-quad-core
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Using http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/Boot 3i from USB flash drive.html from the link above. I managed to boot ESXi using the USB Flash drive however, i just get a PSOB. Don't understand why.

RESOLVED ISSUE : http://communities.vmware.com/message/1142646
 
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So is the E200 an absolute must if you want a raid array or can you just install ESXi on a USB stick and use the onboard controller?

As over £300 for the E200 doesnt make it so much of a bargain.
 
Sure people have installed ESXi without the £300 controller, not 100% sure though.

Just got my Corsair Ram (Great service OCUK TY) and it absolutely flies now with the quad core.
 
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