HP Microservers...

[JustGav]

For those of you looking for a small server for home use, these are a cracking deal at the moment..

 

£134 with the rebate. Holds 4 drives, 8GB of ram. Processor isn't the worlds quickest BUT bang for buck these are the ticket.

 

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/237003

[Scott]

If they were £134 I would have bought 6, they are actually £135, less a penny, though, just outside my budget

 

Fantastic buy those. I'm sure the processor could be thrown out for something a little beefier.

[JustGav]

If they were £134 I would have bought 6, they are actually £135, less a penny, though, just outside my budget

 

Fantastic buy those. I'm sure the processor could be thrown out for something a little beefier.

 

Well, they are still £134 (if you ignore the decimal , or should I say UNDER £135) I ordered 6 as it happens for work for a new experimental disk storage setup I'm trying.. Can't fault the price, I did have to beef them up with some RAM though to 8GB, but performance wise, not bad at all.

[Branners]

To make these a domain controller I'm assuming it would need an OS like Windows2003 or Windows2008?

[johnny g]

To make these a domain controller I'm assuming it would need an OS like Windows2003 or Windows2008?

 

Yep. Or run on Red Hat

[JustGav]

To make these a domain controller I'm assuming it would need an OS like Windows2003 or Windows2008?

 

They would work for that, bear in mind though, they are a dual core AMD 1.3ghz chip (64 bit capable), so won't be rocket ship performance, and will DEFINITELY need more memory.

[Branners]

In theory (although our network makes up its own rules) it would be a DC for around 8 people. Wont be a file share but will be a print server too with jobs spooled from Citrix. When we set up a new venue we try to run as little infrastructure as possible. Tried running without servers and printer servers and using the firewall for DHCP and the DNS across the WAN, and though it works I dont trust it. So these might be worth a punt.

[johnny g]

For £135, it'd be a decent low volume DC and print server JB

[Branners]

Thats one on my shopping list for January then we I have to buy all the other stuff for the newest venue. Should fit nicely on a shelf in the rack too.

[JustGav]

For £135, it'd be a decent low volume DC and print server JB

 

If it is simply DHCP/DNS and printing, then it should easily cope with it. I'd even consider running a proxy server on it to lighten up the bandwidth. A small ubuntu installation would do this all very easily for you. Something like 10.10 with bind/dhcp3/samba/webmin would give you ease of use as well.

 

If it were me, I'd even consider getting rid of the firewall. (I've not checked yet to see if it has space for a 2nd network card), but you could run openvpn back to your main office and it would happily tick away in the background doing everything for you. (being linux it would be easier to manage remotely as well)

[Ark]

For a super-basic Linux home server, I'd probably consider a Globalscale plug-server. Small, silent, only sucks in 6 watts.

[Wez]

For a super-basic Linux home server, I'd probably consider a Globalscale plug-server. Small, silent, only sucks in 6 watts.

 

A mate of mine told me about these a while back, not had chance to look into them yet.

 

For a small home network I cant rate the QNAP devices high enough, there are lots of models available and very easy to manage.

[Ark]

QNAP - hmm, a basic one looks good enough - clearly just a little linux box (like the Globalscale) but doesn't come with any drives.

 

I wonder if those boxes can be persuaded to run other daemons too...

[Wez]

QNAP - hmm, a basic one looks good enough - clearly just a little linux box (like the Globalscale) but doesn't come with any drives.

 

I run a 219P, great bit of kit http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=122

[caseys]

A mate of mine told me about these a while back, not had chance to look into them yet.

 

For a small home network I cant rate the QNAP devices high enough, there are lots of models available and very easy to manage.

 

The shivaplug is also worth looking at.

 

So you doing some bastardisation of clustered nas/das or something Gav?

[JustGav]

The shivaplug is also worth looking at.

 

So you doing some bastardisation of clustered nas/das or something Gav?

 

Yup, custom cheap disk storage system. Basically, filling them with 2TB drives, 4 on site A, 2 on site B, running in both distributed and replicated configuration. A1-A2 share the data which are then mirrored to B1-B2 and then offsited with a different system to C1-C2. Each unit will have 8TB, so across the 6 machines I'll have 16TB available all shared via iscsi. I'm not 100% sure yet if I can put an extra card in it yet, but if I can then I'll add extra gigcards. Servers will also be maxed out with ram up to 8GB of which 7.5GB will be cache memory.

 

All A and B nodes will be active, none of the hardware will run in a passive config. This will then give me an iscsi share/cifs/nfs access for my servers. Will mainly be using it for virtual machines running on VBox node boxes I've got. (Although the vbox nodes run a custom file system driver to connect to the storage network, which automatically has connection redirection / failover)

 

VBox also supports vmotion style operations, so I effectively get a HIGHLY available storage network with adaptive server moving, since I can move the servers round the nodes automatically with minimal scripting work.

 

Let see microsoft do this For the ridiculous low cost this solution is

280 (4x70) for HDDs

134 for the server

120 for mem

[caseys]

Interesting. All async i take it? Not tempted to try sync between a and b? Or would latency be a no no? How does your os or apps cope with async if you lose site a and possibly some in transit or unsent/unapplied data?

 

Having fun myself panning out an async system with space efficient/ thin prov volumes for a consistency group at a remote site. A mix of different speed disks and oh... A few hundred luns. Oh and a snapshot set of luns if complexity wasn't enough.

 

Sometimes I do think your homebrew stuff whilst crazy, is very interesting indeed. Keep me updated with your progress and also need to chat to you about your media centre build sometime soon

[creative]

Yup, custom cheap disk storage system. Basically, filling them with 2TB drives, 4 on site A, 2 on site B, running in both distributed and replicated configuration. A1-A2 share the data which are then mirrored to B1-B2 and then offsited with a different system to C1-C2. Each unit will have 8TB, so across the 6 machines I'll have 16TB available all shared via iscsi. I'm not 100% sure yet if I can put an extra card in it yet, but if I can then I'll add extra gigcards. Servers will also be maxed out with ram up to 8GB of which 7.5GB will be cache memory.

 

All A and B nodes will be active, none of the hardware will run in a passive config. This will then give me an iscsi share/cifs/nfs access for my servers. Will mainly be using it for virtual machines running on VBox node boxes I've got. (Although the vbox nodes run a custom file system driver to connect to the storage network, which automatically has connection redirection / failover)

 

VBox also supports vmotion style operations, so I effectively get a HIGHLY available storage network with adaptive server moving, since I can move the servers round the nodes automatically with minimal scripting work.

 

Let see microsoft do this For the ridiculous low cost this solution is

280 (4x70) for HDDs

134 for the server

120 for mem

 

 

Sorry? I see words and non make sense!

 

I wish I could do all this server stuff....mind you, I guess I could if i tried to learn it!

[JustGav]

Interesting. All async i take it? Not tempted to try sync between a and b? Or would latency be a no no? How does your os or apps cope with async if you lose site a and possibly some in transit or unsent/unapplied data?

It is sync between A and B (sorta , the server software keeps track of what is where automatically and works directly with the client driver so it knows where to request the data from. On the first write it will only be on one node until the sync engine grabs it and then when both nodes have a copy then it the client driver can query either node. To node C it has to be async purely because it is only an 8mbps link, so that will be 4 hourly snapshots or something of that nature. The sync engine works on deltas, so for single large files like virtual machines it is fine.

 

Having fun myself panning out an async system with space efficient/ thin prov volumes for a consistency group at a remote site. A mix of different speed disks and oh... A few hundred luns. Oh and a snapshot set of luns if complexity wasn't enough.

 

Gotta love it, sometimes have a green-site has it's advantages

 

Sometimes I do think your homebrew stuff whilst crazy, is very interesting indeed. Keep me updated with your progress and also need to chat to you about your media centre build sometime soon

 

Any time

[Ark]

The shivaplug is also worth looking at.

 

So you doing some bastardisation of clustered nas/das or something Gav?

 

Globalscale make the Shivaplug, which is being replaced with the new Guruplug, one variant of which even has HDMI-out - perfect for a media centre terminal.

[JustGav]

Globalscale make the Shivaplug, which is being replaced with the new Guruplug, one variant of which even has HDMI-out - perfect for a media centre terminal.

 

Now that is an interesting option Will look into that.... HDMI-out on a decent graphics card with ethernet over power, would be brilliant on my media network

[Ark]

Now that is an interesting option Will look into that.... HDMI-out on a decent graphics card with ethernet over power, would be brilliant on my media network

 

It's a fixed hardware plug server - no option of upgrading the graphics card, but I guess the whole point would be to hook into a TV, so it should be up to the task of running 1080 HD.

[JustGav]

My HP has just arrived, so popped over to office to pick one up..

 

Initial comments, nice little unit, has 4 3.5 drive bays easily accessible. It has 2 mini-pci slots which is a bonus and good number of usbs. Will throw the mem and load it up and add more here.

 

Memory upgrade really is dead easy, two thumb screws, unplug some connectors and slide the board out. Hard drives are even easier, with 4 drive trays already provided.

 

Okay, ubuntu 10.10 amd64 went on smoothly, not driver hiccups or un-id'ed hardware. I've put 2 2TB drives into the unit for testing, and set them up in a volume group, simple concat, so the performance is down to each drive. In the actual servers I'll use a 4 way stripe across the drives, however I am seeing a pleasing 120MB/s transfer over nfs4 which I'm not complaining at. CPU is 40% idle under that load as well, so that is good. With 8GB of ram in them and stripped over 4 disks, I should easily be able to saturate the 3x1GB connections.

 

In summary, brilliant little machines

 

 

top - 02:22:04 up 49 min, 3 users, load average: 1.99, 1.61, 0.90

Tasks: 105 total, 2 running, 103 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie

Cpu(s): 1.1%us, 22.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 32.5%id, 31.6%wa, 0.0%hi, 11.8%si, 0.0%st

Mem: 3927924k total, 3894308k used, 33616k free, 3844k buffers

Swap: 6377468k total, 0k used, 6377468k free, 3658252k cached

 

Total DISK READ: 3.91 K/s | Total DISK WRITE: 149.16 M/s

TID PRIO USER DISK READ DISK WRITE SWAPIN IO> COMMAND

8902 be/4 root 3.91 K/s 320.23 K/s 0.00 % 59.53 % [flush-251:2]

9003 be/4 root 64.14 M/s 62.73 M/s 0.00 % 45.92 % cp -Rv Docs/

1 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 0.00 % init

[ManwithSupra]

If you want to see the specs on this unit then have a look here http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13716_div/13716_div.html

[JustGav]

If you want to see the specs on this unit then have a look here http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13716_div/13716_div.html

 

I really should have looked at them myself really, but for the price point any more than a board and case is a bonus