Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie
HP ProLiant MicroServer
Options
Comments
-
-
-
Anyone use any hardware raid cards in the microserver and if so, which? I bought one of these ages ago but have done nowt with it yet cept for testing various OSs / VMs etc.
I think the best way to go is hardware raid for the drives, then install vSphere 5 and get it to see the raid array.Then create a FreeNAS VM and a few others, which maximises the use of the server.
Anyone use it like this? It think just installing FreeNAS on it is a waste on it's own, as it could do much more with vSphere.
*EDIT* Forgot to add, if anyone is using FreeNAS on a VM on this, complete with other VMs on vSphere on a hardware raid array, is there much reduction in network speeds (copying files to and from) with FreeNAS as opposed to running FreeNAS natively? Interested to know! Cheers.
I seem to find freenas as a VM slower than it should. I'm not sure the network interface is running at full speed uder the VM.
I don't have any actual speed tests and remember this could be due to my network layout, hard disks used in the machine and so on.
I'm not sure I'd recommend running freenas under esxi on the basis of my experience with it. One of the things I had been looking at doing was to just leave it converting media files using handbrake on a different VM on the same machine. Not unsurprisingly this didn't prove very speedy at all nor was I expecting it to but it just doesn't have the oomph to do much more than limited basics. I was going to freenas, windows server and ubuntu server on it at the same time but I'm not really sure thats practical even with 8gb of ram in it.
I tried out plex on it under the windows vm and for transcoding on the fly its not really ideal, too much stuttering at times.
Anyway this is all anecdotal your experience may differ.0 -
i'm kind of doing it that way on my G6950 based HP ML110 G6, just currently without hardware RAID.
I have a FreeNAS8 VM running on ESXi5 with RDM's to eight 2tb disks which I'm using for data.
transfer speeds could be better tbh, but i made a conscious decision to sacrifice that as maximising space across 8 consumer grade disks of that capacity means having to stump for double parity with ZFS2 unless you fancy playing the lotto with a single disk rebuild.
it means i *only*
get 10.7tb of formatted capacity out of all those disks, but at least i know i can make it through a rebuild even if a 2nd disk fell over, without bringing the whole lot down with it.
I'm actually in the middle of setting up iSCSI for ESXi via the FreeNAS VM to move all my other VM's onto, so I'll let you know how that goes and if there's any increase (or decrease, although hopefully not) in performance on iSCSI versus a single local datastore. I'll need to keep the VM files for FreeNAS on the old disk though, for obvious reasons.
one thing i would say is that if you plan on using the softRAID built into FreeNAS8, don't go with ZFS2 unless you have a fairly powerful CPU as it was lagging even with 1CPU and 4gb RAM in ESXi when i was copying files over from my old NAS, so I had to add another CPU and boost the memory to 8gb to speed up the transfer. i guess it's mostly down to the double parity calculations in software.
Also, don't be tempted to go with the 32bit version of FreeNAS8 if you know that the CPU in your ESX server supports 64bit as even if you configure the FreeNAS VM as 32bit, the OS itself can still detect that it's running on underlying 64bit hardware and will cause you all sorts of problems (google for "freenas kernal panic") the minute you start copying a large amount of files to it, as a found out.
I actually have my eye on a 3Ghz quad core Xeon to replace the Pentium G6950, but i'm moving house next week, so the purse strings are a bit too tight this month to get it. 0 -
i'm kind of doing it that way on my G6950 based HP ML110 G6, just currently without hardware RAID.
I have a FreeNAS8 VM running on ESXi5 with RDM's to eight 2tb disks which I'm using for data.
transfer speeds could be better tbh, but i made a conscious decision to sacrifice that as maximising space across 8 consumer grade disks of that capacity means having to stump for double parity with ZFS2 unless you fancy playing the lotto with a single disk rebuild.
it means i *only* get 10.7tb of formatted capacity out of all those disks, but at least i know i can make it through a rebuild even if a 2nd disk fell over, without bringing the whole lot down with it.
I'm actually in the middle of setting up iSCSI for ESXi via the FreeNAS VM to move all my other VM's onto, so I'll let you know how that goes and if there's any increase (or decrease, although hopefully not) in performance on iSCSI versus a single local datastore. I'll need to keep the VM files for FreeNAS on the old disk though, for obvious reasons.
one thing i would say is that if you plan on using the softRAID built into FreeNAS8, don't go with ZFS2 unless you have a fairly powerful CPU as it was lagging even with 1CPU and 4gb RAM in ESXi when i was copying files over from my old NAS, so I had to add another CPU and boost the memory to 8gb to speed up the transfer. i guess it's mostly down to the double parity calculations in software.
Also, don't be tempted to go with the 32bit version of FreeNAS8 if you know that the CPU in your ESX server supports 64bit as even if you configure the FreeNAS VM as 32bit, the OS itself can still detect that it's running on underlying 64bit hardware and will cause you all sorts of problems (google for "freenas kernal panic") the minute you start copying a large amount of files to it, as a found out.
I actually have my eye on a 3Ghz quad core Xeon to replace the Pentium G6950, but i'm moving house next week, so the purse strings are a bit too tight this month to get it.
Ah yeah.. I bought the ML110 G6 too.I remember you asking me some questions about it before you bought yours.I'm using it for my study lab with nested ESXi hosts ala vTardis.Only just started this project so gonna be next year by the time it's finished as I'm only using the supplied 250GB SATA HD atm so need to get a hardware raid card for this too and lots of disks.
Or maybe I should use the Microserver as my study lab and use the ML110 for FreeNAS VM etc ... doing my nut in tbh as I keep changing my mind and can't decide on which to use for what!
0 -
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
-
i keep expecting this thread to be more interesting than it is. can we turn it into a "show us yer box" thread to spice it up a bit?
just want to see what people are doing with theirs.
if you show me yours, i'll show you mine. but i should warn you, mines much bigger.
0 -
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
-
-
Thanks BlackWizard - I'm replacing my aging WHS V1 HP Mediasmart EX475 with this (got WHS 2011 on it). The EX475 was smaller overall but sounds like a hoover and has no PCI slots/optical drive bay so happy with the Proliant. It's really quiet IMO and has no problem streaming HD content to my iPad/iPhone (which the Mediasmart chocked on) so very happy even at the full price. Getting the €120 rebate will make this the best purchase of the year for me. 0
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
fingers crossed that should (hopefully) get fixed soon enough.€275.55 at Dabs.
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=75974788#post759747880 -
fingers crossed that should (hopefully) get fixed soon enough.
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=75974788#post75974788
Not looking very likely.0 -
ah well, it was worth a go.
still, at least we know that they're not making huge profits at our expense. 0 -
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
Advertisement