HP N36L Microserver - £100

[badass]

You mean with hdparm or something more specific?

As Splash says above/below - it's in the BIOS options.

As I'm using the onboard controller (it's essentially a toy which whould hopefully bump the performance of my ESXi home lab environment - if anything goes bad it can all be restored from backup or rebuilt from templates) I just enabled it in the BIOS, where it was disabled by default.

EDIT - ok, after setting a machine to migrate from one datastore (my current Thecus NAS) to this box I'm not massively impressed with the throughput. the CPU is really taking the hit here!

FYI Mine can do around 30MBytes/sec maxing out a single core on an ESX VM using SMB2.

[watercooled]

Is that (30MB/sec) RAID or just plain disks?

[spoon_]

I think using the onboard controller for RAID (which ESXi cannot see) is pretty useless anyway unless on a proper RAID card. SSD array of like 60GB x 4 could be a nice but expensive addition otherwise NFS is a good alternative.

[badass]

Is that (30MB/sec) RAID or just plain disks?

Plain disks. I haven't tried a less CPU heavy protocol than SMB2 for file transfers yet.

[Splash]

I think I've identified the root cause of my pish performance issues in the lack of vmwaretools, and also the fact that it was only using one of the cores (and as such was mullering the core it was using). Will get round to installing them tomorrow and see, but I was getting less than 1MB/s of write from an iSCSI target, and that's with dedupe off.

[Splash]

I think using the onboard controller for RAID (which ESXi cannot see) is pretty useless anyway unless on a proper RAID card. SSD array of like 60GB x 4 could be a nice but expensive addition otherwise NFS is a good alternative.

Don't think you'd get a proper RAID card in there - space is hella tight as it is. I'm just presenting the 4 disks as raw devices to the VM, and doing the RAID in software using RAIDZ.

[watercooled]

Plain disks. I haven't tried a less CPU heavy protocol than SMB2 for file transfers yet.

Seriously? My Atom server manages 70MB/s without breaking into a sweat and peaks at >90 at times. That's on Debian BTW. Is there something I'm missing, I expected this to be faster if anything.

[spoon_]

Don't think you'd get a proper RAID card in there - space is hella tight as it is. I'm just presenting the 4 disks as raw devices to the VM, and doing the RAID in software using RAIDZ.

This kinda bothers me a little... at the end of the day I can always stick everything on iSCSI, including ESXi and run the box completely diskless.

Do you think half height + probably half length card would fit there at all?

What's providing RAID-Z and ZFS in your box?

[watercooled]

Half-height/length should fit according to the specs.

[paul92]

Just half height should fit, surely with the given dimensions it would just squeeze in?

[badass]

Seriously? My Atom server manages 70MB/s without breaking into a sweat and peaks at >90 at times. That's on Debian BTW. Is there something I'm missing, I expected this to be faster if anything.

Thats on server 2008 R2 running as a single core VM. There's a lot of additional overhead there. I did briefly run it with just server 2008 R2 installed on the server and the idle power was around 22 watts (compared to 30 ish on ESXi) but I never checked SMB2 throughput to the disk.
I'd expect debian installed directly on a server to have less overhead than Server 2008 R2 TBH. I'm pretty sure the Athlon in the Microserver is a lot more powerful than any Atom CPU but I may be mistaken.

[watercooled]

Ahh right, I thought that didn't sound right. And yeah that's my impression too, hence the confusion.

[Splash]

This kinda bothers me a little... at the end of the day I can always stick everything on iSCSI, including ESXi and run the box completely diskless.

Do you think half height + probably half length card would fit there at all?

What's providing RAID-Z and ZFS in your box?

Nexentastor Community. I suspect that either the NIC is just duff (sadly I don't have a spare gigabit NIC to test this theory as yet) or the CPU just isn't really up to serving iSCSI on ZFS. I get very spikey transfers (up to 65MB/s, then down to 1MB/s, then back again) before the transfer just fails.

I'm just trying out Openfiler in a similar manner - SMP config as an ESXi guest, will see how the performance looks on that for iSCSI. I bought the box to provide iSCSI datastores for my main ESXi server, and was considering picking up a Fujitsu MX130 (Serversplus are doing a deal on a dual core box with 16Gb of RAM) or an ML110 G6 when my overtime comes through this month as a second ESXi host, but the Microserver just isn't cutting it with Nexenta as things stand.

As for room in the box for expansion cards - whatever you put in would have to be half height, I can try to grab you some measurements of available depth tomorrow if you like.

[watercooled]

Has anyone here done that BIOS mod to get the SATA/eSATA ports working in AHCI mode to improve performance? Some talk about it on this thread: http://lime-technology.com/forum/ind...?topic=8349.15

[Splash]

Nope, wasn't aware of it. Might be handy to have the ODD SATA port running at full whack though as that's where my OS is running from. I'll give it a shot tonight, I guess.

[b0redom]

Splash, you should try the latest release of FreeNAS. I benchmarked a bunch of different ZFS OSes, Solaris, Nexenta, FreeBSD etc. FreeNAS 8 RC3 is by far the most performant using ZFS disks. The iSCSI client blows away anything else I've tried it on.