Archives for category: hardware

HP ProLiant MicroServer – Oh, it’s there!

January 17, 11 //
3

In a pre­vi­ous arti­cle, HP Pro­Liant MicroServer – Not Quite There Yet?, I ques­tioned whether the HP Pro­liant MicroServer could have a place in a cor­po­rate environment.

I finally got my hands on one, and for my spe­cific use case it’s pretty much per­fect! Sure, I would love to have some vSphere sup­ported RAID con­troller and a beefier CPU but in my use case the MicroServer deliv­ers just what we need for some of our small branch offices.

The MicroServer is very quiet (22 dB), has a very small foot­print (21 x 26 x 26,7cm), that fits into a office envi­ron­ment (no dat­a­cen­ter) and you can eas­ily fit a read-only domain con­troller (RODC) on it.

Our setup ended up with the fol­low­ing to sup­port a remote office with 4–5 people.

    HP MicroServer

  • HP MicroServer with 8GB ram and HP MicroServer Remote Access Card
  • Iomega IX4-200d for backup purposes
  • Watch­guard x10e Firewall
  • HP Procurve 1410-8g
  • HP ProCurve MSM310 Wire­less Access Point



The MicroServer is installed with VMware vSphere Hyper­vi­sor (ESXi) 4.1, run­ning one VM with Win­dows Server 2008 R2 con­fig­ured as a RODC. In addi­tion to the domain con­troller fea­tures, it acts as a local file server repli­cat­ing via DFS.

Why run it in vSphere at all? Well, I do like the porta­bil­ity of vir­tual machines and it does make us hard­ware inde­pen­dent in the sense that we could change the phys­i­cal hard­ware around with­out hav­ing to rein­stall the Win­dows Server. It would also make it a lot eas­ier to per­form remote back­ups of the VM itself, should we want to do so.

All in all, the MicroServer does indeed fit into some cor­po­rate envi­ron­ments and sce­nar­ios. I would still not use it for a vSphere lab, unless I can crab a cou­ple of them and set up a clus­ter though. The MicroServer is so small that the WAF index might just make that plausible!

HP ProLiant MicroServer — Not Quite There Yet?

September 10, 10 //
4

When HP announced their new Pro­Liant MicroServer, I really hoped that it would be the per­fect answer to a spe­cific use case I’ve been look­ing at lately.

Basi­cally, what I’m look­ing for is a small chas­sis, low noise branch office server that would be used to host a sin­gle vir­tual machine, offer­ing Read-Only Domain Con­troller (RODC) and Dis­trib­uted File Sys­tem (DFS) file-shares.

Ini­tially it looked to fit the bill perfectly:

  • Small foot­print; Check
  • Low Noise lev­els; Check

But, sadly, that’s where it stops. The first ver­sion of the HP Pro­Liant MicroServer comes with one CPU offer­ing, namely theAMD Athlon II NEO N36L which isn’t all that much to run even a single-VM ESXi instance on.

The cur­rent tech spec page does not go into much details about the stor­age con­troller, other than it’s an “Inte­grated 4 port SATA RAID Stor­age Con­troller”, which makes it impos­si­ble to check for com­pat­i­bil­ity on the offi­cial VMware HCL.

The 1GbE NC107i NIC sup­plied with the server, seems to be sup­ported by VMware though, at least accord­ing to the Pro­Liant option VMware sup­port matrix.

I under­stand that HP cre­ated this server for a dif­fer­ent use-case than the one I’m out­lin­ing here, and you can’t really crit­i­cize them for that, I just hope that this is just the first of sev­eral offer­ings from HP and that the next ver­sion comes with bet­ter CPU offerings.

A proper CPU would make this baby the per­fect entry level, small foot­print, low noise branch-office server.

Update: Simon Sea­grave has posted as “some­what” more ver­bose analy­sis of the HP Pro­Liant Microserver: New HP Pro­liant MicroServer – a decent vSphere lab server can­di­date?. His con­clu­sion is pretty much the same as mine though; give us more CPU and a vSphere sup­ported RAID con­troller and we’re all set. I couldn’t agree more.