HP ProLiant MicroServer

** Slightly off topic

Has anyone posted their uptime yet. Mine is not too good, 'cos I've been swapping HDD's around a lot and rebooting. But currently just over 10days :(

I'm sure this baby can run for years without problems. :erm:
 
Has anybody else put 4 x 2TB drives in the microserver under FreeNAS? I think the answer to that is yes; but how much RAM do you guys have? I've uncovered a weird situation where, when I have four drives in a zpool, one of the drives will lag badly and slow the whole cluster down. Things were improved about threefold when I used the 4k setting on my drives (to writes of about 20MB/s), but as soon as I create a zpool with only three drives, the write speed increases by a factor of about five above that -- about 100MB/s, which is the speed I'm expecting -- and it doesn't appear as if the system is even completely IO-bound at that point. Any fourth drive lags terribly, though.

The only possible difference between my setup and some other posters' is the RAM, as I see it -- I've got 5GB at the moment, which is below the recommended threshold (but above the minimum). Think this is my problem?
 
Dan C said:
** Slightly off topic

Has anyone posted their uptime yet. Mine is not too good, 'cos I've been swapping HDD's around a lot and rebooting. But currently just over 10days :(

I'm sure this baby can run for years without problems. :erm:
Click to expand...

Its been 14 days since my last power failure.

(0)gary@deli:$~/uptime
09:24:10 up 14 days, 14:47, 1 user, load average: 0.31, 0.11, 0.08
Click to expand...
 
jack1986 said:
Has anybody else put 4 x 2TB drives in the microserver under FreeNAS? I think the answer to that is yes; but how much RAM do you guys have? I've uncovered a weird situation where, when I have four drives in a zpool, one of the drives will lag badly and slow the whole cluster down. Things were improved about threefold when I used the 4k setting on my drives (to writes of about 20MB/s), but as soon as I create a zpool with only three drives, the write speed increases by a factor of about five above that -- about 100MB/s, which is the speed I'm expecting -- and it doesn't appear as if the system is even completely IO-bound at that point. Any fourth drive lags terribly, though.

The only possible difference between my setup and some other posters' is the RAM, as I see it -- I've got 5GB at the moment, which is below the recommended threshold (but above the minimum). Think this is my problem?
Click to expand...

Are you sure it is not the 4th drive itself, i.e. have you created the 3-drive cluster with a different arrangement of the drives and notice the same problem?
 
yeti said:
Are you sure it is not the 4th drive itself, i.e. have you created the 3-drive cluster with a different arrangement of the drives and notice the same problem?
Click to expand...

I have, yeah -- with two distinct drives. I want to do another test to double-check this, but the dev names were different.

I also tried creating a 4 drive zpool and offlining the misbehaving drive -- but then another one started misbehaving! When I onlined the drive again, they both continued to perform badly. It interests me that, with 3 drives, the operation does not appear to be IO-bound for the entire operation (FreeBSD is not issuing write instructions to the drives 100% of the time -- the figure dips), but as soon as the 4th drive is added, its figure stays locked at 100% or slightly over for the entire run. The other drives, which are operating much faster, drop off for extended periods -- it looks like they're waiting for the slow one to catch up.
 
Dan C said:
** Slightly off topic

Has anyone posted their uptime yet. Mine is not too good, 'cos I've been swapping HDD's around a lot and rebooting. But currently just over 10days :(

I'm sure this baby can run for years without problems. :erm:
Click to expand...

Code: 
15:32:55 up 13 days, 14:26,  2 users,  load average: 1.25, 1.09, 1.02

Only restarted it to make sure my startup scripts were all working :)
 
I'm rethinking my setup which is currently 2x2tb + 8gig ram zfs striped, I want to add redundancy probably raid z1. The drives that im using are seagate 5900rpm 64mb cache the problem is they went up and now cost R2000 each which i'm obviously not prepaired to pay.

I can get a western digital lp drive for half the price also 2tb 64mb cache and intellipower. Can one have mixed flavoured drives in a Z array apart from the size, will stuff like sector size, rpm and read/ seek times effect the raid's performance?

What's your guys recommendations with mixed vendor drivers.
 
First off, I resolved my issues with the slow performance on a 4-disk zpool. I followed some advice on the Freenas forums to enable the Microserver's write cache in the BIOS, which has taken write speeds to ~160MB/s. Not sure why the write cache only provides an appreciable performance increase after you hit four drives -- my knowledge of the mechanics of the process is not comprehensive enough -- but I'm happy.

abs1 said:
I'm rethinking my setup which is currently 2x2tb + 8gig ram zfs striped, I want to add redundancy probably raid z1. The drives that im using are seagate 5900rpm 64mb cache the problem is they went up and now cost R2000 each which i'm obviously not prepaired to pay.
Click to expand...

Couldn't find them on-line at anything below about 2k either, but Incredible Connection (in CT anyway) still has them for R1500, which is not terrible. Given the shortages, you're probably not going to pick up much that's affordable in the next nine months.

abs1 said:
I can get a western digital lp drive for half the price also 2tb 64mb cache and intellipower. Can one have mixed flavoured drives in a Z array apart from the size, will stuff like sector size, rpm and read/ seek times effect the raid's performance?

What's your guys recommendations with mixed vendor drivers.
Click to expand...

From what I've read, this shouldn't be a problem. I believe the WD and the Seagate have the same sector size (4k), and while a slow-performing drive is going to slow down the entire zpool (as I've recently discovered), the WDs are not much slower than the Seagate. The received wisdom, after all, is not to pack your storage solution full of drives from the same batch and the same vendor, to avoid their failing due to some common defect in the manufacturing process.
 
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Hey guys quick question is it possible to have 2x 1 tb in raid 1 and then again 2 x 1tb in raid 1 - I want the 2nd raid array to backup the first can the hp microserver do this ? : O
 
Wong said:
Hey guys quick question is it possible to have 2x 1 tb in raid 1 and then again 2 x 1tb in raid 1 - I want the 2nd raid array to backup the first can the hp microserver do this ? : O
Click to expand...

Its called RAID 1+0; however, the HP MS herself can not achieve this without a 3rd party RAID controller. Please see the myhtpc.co.za wiki (search this thread for a link) or check HP's website for the specifications of the HP MS.
 
Wong said:
Hey guys quick question is it possible to have 2x 1 tb in raid 1 and then again 2 x 1tb in raid 1 - I want the 2nd raid array to backup the first can the hp microserver do this ? : O
Click to expand...

Short answer yes...

long answer
The onboard should be able to handle to seperate raids but you won't be able to setup a RAID 1+0 or 0+1
Where it would mirror them for you. I wouldn't use the onboard fakeRAID in any case!

If you're just planning on doing manual backups to the other RAID I don't think it would be a problem.

What OS are you planning on using? What's the purpose of the setup?
If you give us more info maybe we can help you a bit more!

link to myhtpc.co.za/wiki
 
Received mine last week and couldn't get ESXi installed - needs 2GB ram :( . After nearly ripping the skin from my fingers I managed to put in some ECC ram I had lying around, but the system wouldn't boot. Dodgy RAM I reckon. Today I'm picking up a GT210 and 4GB DDR3 ram. Then (finally) I can install ESXi and have XBMC Live working.

Perfect timing too because my HTPC died last night. After many, many resuscitations I think I'll finally let it rest ;)
 
hungrybeaver said:
Received mine last week and couldn't get ESXi installed - needs 2GB ram :( . After nearly ripping the skin from my fingers I managed to put in some ECC ram I had lying around, but the system wouldn't boot. Dodgy RAM I reckon. Today I'm picking up a GT210 and 4GB DDR3 ram. Then (finally) I can install ESXi and have XBMC Live working.

Perfect timing too because my HTPC died last night. After many, many resuscitations I think I'll finally let it rest ;)
Click to expand...

Do you have a separate box to house XBMC Live? It will not work as a VM on ESXi, unless you remote desktop into it (from another box - pointless).
 
yeti said:
Do you have a separate box to house XBMC Live? It will not work as a VM on ESXi, unless you remote desktop into it (from another box - pointless).
Click to expand...

What I plan to do is use the server primarily for ESXi and run XBMC Live from a USB. All my content is on other computers so I'll just be streaming over the network.

I'm sure it will only run one at a time. So I'd have to shutdown ESX and restart the server when I want to use XBMC. Mind you I haven't done much reading up on XBMC Live so I may be completely wrong about the whole thing!
 
OK, my bays are about full now.
I've got 4 inside the case, and 1 external hooked up to it.


So....How do I go about using the other SATA on the mobo, has anyone done it? I would like to add a 6th drive in the DVD Bay
afaik you need to do a flash update and flash it again with some kind of modded bios - but i'm not sure I wanna do it yet, unless someone else has done it and can help me out?
 
Keeper said:
OK, my bays are about full now.
I've got 4 inside the case, and 1 external hooked up to it.


So....How do I go about using the other SATA on the mobo, has anyone done it? I would like to add a 6th drive in the DVD Bay
afaik you need to do a flash update and flash it again with some kind of modded bios - but i'm not sure I wanna do it yet, unless someone else has done it and can help me out?
Click to expand...

I used the instructions from this page , about halfway down! Worked fine!

At some stage I'm gonna test Nexenta or open Indiana as a NAS on my one MS:D
 
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