May 26, 2011 · 11:46 am
↓ Jump to Comments

New file server, part 2

The HP Proliant Microserver that I ordered arrived on Tuesday. It’s a nice system and a real bargain even for the full price of £180.

Opening the case you can see four drive caddies, each one capable of taking a standard 2 TB SATA drive. Also on the motherboard you may notice a USB socket where you can locate a boot USB key:

Some brief specs …

CPU: “AMD Athlon(tm) II Neo N36L Dual-Core Processor”
CPU flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt pdpe1gb rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow constant_tsc rep_good nonstop_tsc extd_apicid pni monitor cx16 popcnt lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy abm sse4a 3dnowprefetch osvw ibs skinit wdt nodeid_msr npt lbrv svm_lock nrip_save
bogomips: 2595.63
L1 cache: 64 KB per core
L2 cache: 1024 KB per core
Memory: 1GB ECC @ 1333 MHz
Network: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5723 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (1 port)

11 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , ,

11 responses to “New file server, part 2”

  1. Ray
    May 26, 2011 at 1:26 pm

    Very nice. I have one of these with 8GB RAM and am also running a few KVM VM’s quite happily…

    Reply
  2. Peter
    May 26, 2011 at 2:00 pm

    I actually got one of these myself recently (as did a number of others in the office) and you can easily add a 5th drive in the optical/tape drive bay. Some have 5x3Tb drives plus a USB boot so the disks are pure array storage.

    Reply
  3. joshuadf
    May 27, 2011 at 2:58 pm

    Very nice, though personally I think I’d rather boot from the array (via gpt) rather than rely on usb for the OS.

    Reply
    • rich
      May 27, 2011 at 3:09 pm

      How do you do that?

      My plan was to put just /boot on the USB key, allowing me to enter the LUKS key and mount the array and continue the boot.

      Reply
      • Joshua Daniel Franklin
        June 3, 2011 at 3:03 pm

        At least with Red Hat EL6, just use parted to create a gpt and make sure you avoid “zerombr” or “clearpart –initlabel”. I usually kickstart, you can put this in pre:

        dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=64

        parted -s /dev/sda mklabel gpt

        And then a section like this will work:

        clearpart –linux –drives=sda
        part /boot –fstype=ext4 –size=500
        part pv.01 –grow –size=1
        volgroup vg0 –pesize=4096 pv.01
        logvol / –fstype=ext4 –name=lv0 –vgname=vg0 –grow –size=1024 –maxsize=3064
        logvol swap –name=lv_swap –vgname=vg0 –grow –size=1984 –maxsize=2048
        logvol /data –fstype=ext4 –name=lv1 –vgname=vg0 –size=1 –grow

      • Joshua Daniel Franklin
        June 3, 2011 at 3:04 pm

        Oh, wait, you’re doing mdraid right? Not sure it would work.

  4. mbooth
    May 31, 2011 at 7:47 pm

    Does the Broadcom adapter cause you any grief in Fedora?

    Reply
    • rich
      May 31, 2011 at 8:22 pm

      It just works.

      02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5723 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 10)

      tg3 0000:02:00.0: eth0: Tigon3 [partno(BCM95723) rev 5784100] (PCI Express) MAC address d8:d3:85:af:80:b9
tg3 0000:02:00.0: eth0: attached PHY is 5784 (10/100/1000Base-T Ethernet) (WireSpeed[1])
tg3 0000:02:00.0: eth0: RXcsums[1] LinkChgREG[0] MIirq[0] ASF[0] TSOcap[1]
tg3 0000:02:00.0: eth0: dma_rwctrl[76180000] dma_mask[64-bit]
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready
tg3 0000:02:00.0: eth0: Link is up at 100 Mbps, full duplex

      (100 Mbps because I’ve temporarily got it plugged into an old hub).

      Reply

  5. Pingback: What’s a good microserver for virtualization? | Richard WM Jones

  6. Pingback: Intel NUC | Richard WM Jones

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.