HP N36L Microserver - £100

[Splash]

Aye, sadly the 2 I had are sat in my NAS and my main ESXi box, so I'll need to order another couple come payday (one for this box, another to hold as spare)

[Splash]

ok, giving the Celerra UBER VSA a shot, let's see how this turns out...

EDIT - ok, the Celerra is fun but iSCSI performance really wasn't what I was looking for. Have noticed that Openfiler has released 2.99 recently, so I installed that to USB key, built the RAID5 array (extra disk on the ODD is there as a hotspare) and am now throwing some files around - performance is pretty decent but most importantly I'm not seeing the disk dropouts that I was seeing for most things under ESXi. I suspect this is going to be what I use in the long run.

[spoon_]

Did anyone try the HP remote card thingy? Just curious...

[b0redom]

The problem I found with Openfiler is that if you have a drive drop out (I had a faulty SATA cable), let's say you have:

hda
hdb
hdc
hdd

and hdc drops out you get

hda
hdb
hdc (was hdd)

now when hdc comes back:

hda
hdb
hdc (was hdd)
hde (was hdc)

It was all getting really confusing, and I ended up losing data. With ZFS this doesn't matter as the meta data is on each disk.

[watercooled]

Can't you use UUIDs instead?

[badass]

I've got the updated BIOS in my Microserver now and have run crystaldiskmark on a VM that is stored as below.

VM (inc vmdk etc) <----NFS Export------->Nexentastor ZFS Mirror set VM<---->VMFS3 file store on the 160GB HDD on the microserver.
The Block size is 4kb. the VM is 4k aligned and dedupe is enabled using SHA256 without verify. Nexentastor is not set to write before acknowledging writes and has 2GB RAM. The ZFS mirror set is 25GB

Initially, the figures did not reflect the lack responsiveness of the machine however.
Sequential read and write was reported as 30MB/sec as was 512K random read/write
4k random read/write was reported as over 4MB/sec with both QD=1 and QD=32

After running the test, however the VM that had ran the crystaldiskmark test absolutely flew.
It's not the ARC kicning in on Nexentastor as the VM had been running like this for ages.
I can only put it down to VMware with the "cold" VM behaviour. VM's seem to behave like engines: At first they are down on power but after running for a while they are just fine.
The Microserver is nowhere near hitting its RAM limits.

[Splash]

Hmm... ESXi 4.1U1? or something else?


Tempted to give that another shot as I haven't since the BIOS update.

[Biscuit]

My Microserver arrived yesterday (yayyyy) but im going back home to see my parents for a week tomorrow and wont get to play with it till i back (boooooo).

I have struggled to keep up this conversation but could someone give me suggestions on a good free OS to use.? The whole thing will be a learning experience for me so any suggestions are welcome.
I may well just use it as a NAS for backing up my other computers however it would be nice if i could run the Open DNS Updater and a VPN Server of some kind.

[watercooled]

If you want something simple with a small learning curve, you could use FreeNAS.

But if you're prepared to put the time in and want to customise however you like, try a normal Linux OS, I'm most familiar with Debian but you might prefer something else. You won't need a GUI - apart from using more resources, especially RAM, most server software doesn't have a GUI front-end so you'd be working in a terminal anyway. It's also fairly simple to get an SSH server up and running so you can log in remotely and don't need keyboard/mouse/monitor permanently attached to your server.

[badass]

Hmm... ESXi 4.1U1? or something else?


Tempted to give that another shot as I haven't since the BIOS update.

It's ESXi4.1U1

[Splash]

It's ESXi4.1U1

Ta, will give it another shot in that case, but on new disks (I've a spare 2Tb and the 250Gb unit that came with the server) and see if the dropouts are fixed with the new BIOS

[badass]

After spending much of the day wrestling with Nexentastor, I am rapidly losing patience.
I'm running 3.0.0 - latest is 3.0.4.
setup appliance upgrade doesn't find the updates and setup appliance upgrade -c requires messing around with text files before it works!

I have a constant problem with the NFS shares dropping out when Vmware starts moving data around on them, using Internet explorer 8 on the Management web interface often crashes the whole appliance!
Finally, it decided to lose a bunch of vmware files last night for no fathomable reason.
I've now added CIFS to the existing shares and am copying off the files for VM's still on it and am getting around 10-12MB/sec.
Either 3.0.4 fixes all of these problems and hugely improves performance or I'm moving to something else.
Of course I have no idea if it will as despite 3.0.4 being our for a couple of months now, they haven't updated the changelog!
I shall be performing the upgrade by simply downloading the 3.0.4 ISO and donig a fresh install as I really can't be bothered working out how to use the crappy text editor that works on their CLI.
I will certainly not be recommending anyone ever uses this software for production data and you'd have to be insane to pay any money for the enterprise version, let alone the several thousand pounds!

Anyone uses FreeNas 8.0 RC5?

[Splash]

I tried FreeNAS 8 RC5 as a test for a mate who's using FreeNAS 7 as a NAS with FUPPES serving files, but there is no FUPPES plugin as yet for 8, which made it a no-no. I find the UI for 8 leaves a lot to be desired, and the hoops you have to jump through to serve up an iSCSI volume for use meant I just couldn't be chewed. He's now working on building an Ubuntu server as all he requires is SMB on top of a reliable software RAID, but there must be some media serving capabilities - as such the increased overhead of ZFS over Ext3 just ain't worth it for him.

I'd love to be able to use ZFS, but the honest truth is that I'm finding the new release of Openfiler (2.99) to be much more stable than anything else I've used. I'm using the box purely for serving up storage for VMs to site on - iSCSI primarily, but I'm tempted to give NFS a shot too. It's all test kit, so it's not the end of the world if I lose anything or if the performance ain't great but I like to get the best out of what I have.

[b0redom]

Can't you use UUIDs instead?

Is there a simple way to do that through OpenFiler? If I really wanted the hassle of a Linux server where I had to create it all myself, I'd choose something more fully featured. Really I only want Software RAID (preferably ZFS though as it's better), SMB, NFS, iSCSI support.

[b0redom]

I tried FreeNAS 8 RC5 as a test for a mate who's using FreeNAS 7 as a NAS with FUPPES serving files, but there is no FUPPES plugin as yet for 8, which made it a no-no. I find the UI for 8 leaves a lot to be desired, and the hoops you have to jump through to serve up an iSCSI volume for use meant I just couldn't be chewed.

Yeah, to be fair it was a bit of a PITA when I tried it, but once it was working, I was getting much higher throughput that OpenSolaris, Ubuntu etc.

[spoon_]

Can anyone think of PCI-E x1 Dual NIC?

Ideally on VMware HCL

Found the NIC, now need to check the HCL...