Tag:

Proliant

HP unwraps ProLiant Gen9 hardware, strategy for 25 more years of compute

by Philip Sellers August 28, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

This morning, HP CEO Meg Whitman unwrapped a new generation of HP’s ProLiant servers and unpacked the company’s compute strategy the years ahead. HP first introduced the server to the world 25 years ago and in celebration of that milestone, HP is looking forward to the 25 years to come. The strategy is wrapped around a focus on customer outcomes rather than the incremental tick and tock of hardware.

HP is responding to the increasing pressure being put onto IT shops due to the increase of data, data devices, apps and connections. In its research, the growth curve of incremental change in server hardware and the curve of requirements for IT shops simply don’t match. Incremental change won’t allow business to keep up with the increasing needs based on time, power or space. So the focus for the future from HP is to orchestrate and reduce the manual steps required for administrators to accomplish their work.

HP ProLiant Gen9 Family

HP see the future of compute as an increasing amount of pooling for resources, dynamically re-alloacting and re-tasking resources based on changing needs throughout the day. HP Helion and OpenStack will play a major role in the transformation of the future of compute. Traditional applications just can’t meet business needs.

I had the chance to talk with Peter Evans, vice president of HP Servers Global Marketing, this morning and he told me that the ProLiant Gen9 hardware has a strong focus on increasing the performance per dollar, kilowatt and square foot. HP has spent a lot of time working to reduce the number of manual processes and clicks that are required to perform the tasks that consume a lot of practitioner’s time.

While HP is talking about their vision for the next 25 years of compute, they’ve been delivering on this vision for the past 2 year with ProLiant Gen8. A lot of the innovation that went into Gen8 aligns with the focus that HP has with this strategy. HP has collected and aggregated data that it gleaned from the Insight Online data and diagnostics information, information provided back by their partners and based on the experiences of their professional services organization and system engineers. All of this feedback and data has gone into the prioritization and decision making of what features get the precious attention of HP development cycles. The focus is more focused customer outcomes and not just on the technology.

Evans unpacked 3 metrics of focus that HP is delivering with the Gen9 announcement. The first is economics of the datacenter. ProLiant Gen9 offers customers a 3x improvement in performance. HP has performed comparative studies against its own G6, G7 and Gen8 systems as well as competitor’s servers. The second area is time to service. It is all about optimizing the number of clicks and amount of time before customer are able to begin using a solution on the ProLiant server. In some cases, Evans says that HP has reduced the number of clicks required from 480 to just 4 using iLO, OneView, Intelligent Provisioning and other methods. The last is value of service. In that, HP is focused on providing the best possible experiences for running particular applications, enabling better density and more productivity for its customers.

ProLiant Gen9 Enhancements

Among the new features are enhancements to the iLO including iLO Federation, UEFI BIOS, updates to the Intelligent Provisioning and improvements to SmartCache, array controllers and drives supported.

iLO gets an upgrade by adding a redesigned API interface with OneView integration in mind. iLO will have a fully compliant RESTful API that OneView can use for orchestration. OneView will also make use of the new iLO Federation feature that debuts with the Gen9 systems. Althought new with Gen9 servers, iLO Federation is also available to Gen8 systems.

iLO Federation takes the standard iLO4 and allows it to multicast at boot and join other iLO on the network. From there, administrators can form groups of servers to aid in management from the iLO. The iLO Federation enables a new cascading firmware deployment method rather than sequentially and the ability to change and push settings across multiple systems easily versus making the changes 1 system at a time.

UEFI BIOS is another new feature for the Gen9 hardware. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is the extension of EFI firmware that Intel originally developed for Itanium processors back in the 90’s. UEFI replace EFI and is a standard for low-level software between the OS and the hardware. It is meant to replace BIOS, which has limitations. UEFI is programmable, allowing OEM’s like HP to put additional software in this low-level operating system. UEFI allows HP to implement a new Secure Boot technology, though the specifics weren’t fully disclosed.

Intelligent Provisioning 2.0 will debut in the Gen9 hardware and will feature acceleration features aimed to get the server deployed and running a workload in less time and with less clicks. One of the tidbits I heard from the StoreVirtual team is that the new Intelligent Provisioning 2.0 will include the ability to deploy a StoreVirtual VSA easily. Intelligent Provisioning will go out and retrieve the latest version of the StoreVirtual VSA and deploy it onto the hardware with minimal interaction required. In addition, HP has been giving away free 1TB StoreVirtual VSA licenses with new server purchases all throughout the Gen8 line and is likely to continue [I did not confirm], making this a free and easy SAN to deploy.

In terms of workload acceleration, HP has extended support for 12 Gb/s SAS Expander cards and 12 Gb/s Smart Array Controllers and 12 GB/s SSD Drives. PCIe Workload Accelerators and HP SmartCache deliver additional performance bumps. HP says that the 12Gb/s SSDs and SmartCache will deliver 4x performance improvement.

The ProLiant Gen9 systems continue the same industrial design as the Gen8 servers, according to the systems that were shown during the webcast, with the silver and black metal bezels.

Although a lot of discussion about compute, there was absolutely no word on the processors inside of the Gen9 servers. HP did not disclose a time frame for the ProLiant Gen9 hardware to ship, either, but it did mention that the following systems would be the first to ship:

HP BladeSystem

HP ProLiant BL460c Gen9

Rack and tower servers

HP ProLiant DL160 Gen9
HP ProLiant DL180 Gen9
HP ProLiant ML350 Gen9
HP ProLiant DL360 Gen9
HP ProLiant DL380 Gen9

Solid Heritage

The ProLiant Gen9 builds on a solid platform of the ProLiant Gen8. The last new ProLiant was introduced earlier this year, the DL580 Gen8, which brought the Gen8 features to the biggest x86 rack-mount server that HP offers. The DL580 Gen8 also features the UEFI BIOS.

ProLiant Gen8 was announced back in March of 2012 and brought a lot of features directly aimed at easing administrator’s problems. The Gen8 models introduced the iLO4 management processor, HP SmartMemory and SmartDrives. iLO4 was a big step forward, moving monitoring capabilities that had been running inside of the system’s operating system into the management processor and removing the needs for hardware monitoring agents inside of the OS. iLO4 also improved on the KVM and IP management experience for administrators. At the same time, HP announced Insight Online, a system health portal that the iLO4 could report into that was hosted with HP. In addition to automatically creating cases for hardware issues, the portal also collected system information and would allow HP to identify common problems across customers and address those based on the analytics from data submitted.

SmartMemory and SmartDrives were both innovations that were direct responses to customer requests. SmartMemory provided proactive failure reporting for RAM and attempted to alleviate common memory failures. SmartDrives added an indicator to the drive to show whether it was safe to pull the drive or not. It had an illuminated warning light if the drive was in use and unsafe to remove. From an administrator’s standpoint, that was a great innovation because pulling a mirrored drive is a common fail-back mechanism in the datacenter, but pulling the wrong drive or the right drive at the wrong time can lead to a system crash.

ProLiant Gen8 also brought location awareness to the platform. Combined with smart racks, the server could identify back to HP management software where it was positioned in the datacenter and through the combination of the Sea of Sensors, HP’s software could help to identify hot spots and problems in the datacenter environment. The new blue power adapters, indicated the Location Discovery Services capability of the hardware. The feature was rolled out incrementally across the rack and blade servers in the Gen8 line.

Good Timing

The new generation of ProLiant is positioned at a great time in the industry. An IDC report this week indicates that server sales may have turned the corner and showed 2.5 percent growth versus the previous year. HP was still on top with over 25% of the revenue share.

Of all the servers that I have ever administered, HP ProLiant is my first choice. iLO adds tremendous value to me as an administrator. The Gen8 additions of drive indicators, pre-fail warnings, agentless hardware management have been time saving and welcome addtions as my server farms and responsibilities have grown. The Support Pack for ProLiant and integrated testing of OS agents, drivers and firmware has brought a higher level of stability to the hardware platforms. The addition of Intelligent Provisioning and on-the-board deployment services saved the time of having to download and burn and ISO for SmartStart to ease system deployment. And ProLiant Gen9 extends upon that with easier Intelligent Provisioning features, iLO Federation and general performance improvements. I’ll be excited when our first model rolls in…

More information is available at hp.com/go/compute and inside the official Press Kit at hp.com.

August 28, 2014 0 comments

Patching HP customized ESXi installs with latest agents and drivers

by Philip Sellers April 22, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

If you’re running ESXi deployed from custom HP ESXi installation images but you’re not patching the HP utilities inside with each ESXi update, you may be setting yourself up for trouble in the future. And simply pointing to the VMware repositories won’t update these custom tools — you also have to point towards the HP vibs repository to get all of the latest updates. So, lets look at how to do that…

Updates & Patching for ESXi

VMware has done a good job of providing administrators ways to keep their ESXi deployments up to date – both with offline bundles and with VMware Update Manager for patching the ESXi systems. Either method is pretty simple and HP leverages these same tools for its custom vibs.

For HP, administrators should point to http://vibsdepot.hp.com for the latest and most up to date information about the correct recipe of VMware and HP tools and driver versions. This is also the repository for automated updates that can be plugged directly into VMware Update Manager – or can be manually downloaded and loaded into Update Manager or used as offline bundles.

Why not just deploy VMware’s default ESXi?

Some administrators adopted the HP customized ESXi image early and others have held out until the latest ProLiant Gen8 hardware was released. The latest ProLiants need storage and network controller drivers included in the customized HP ESXi image to successfully deploy ESXi on Gen8. So now, a growing community has deployed additional HP utilities into their ESXi as well. In my own experience, that’s not been an issue, however I did hit a problem a couple months back where excessive logging from one HP tool filled up my ESXi RAMdisk. Filling the RAMdisk made the system unmanageable even though the VM’s continued to operate on the host. So like any other software, you need to patch those drivers, tools and utilities from HP if they’re present in your ESXi.

Patching options for HP customized deployments

As mentioned earlier, the HP updates are deployed using the same VMware provided tools as all other ESXi patches. Administrators can use VMware Update Manager for a more automated deployment, ESXCLI for command line or scripted installations or they can use Image Builder tools to package the HP vibs into images that they are creating for deployment. Since I’m primarily focusing on patching, Update Manager and ESXCLI would be our two go-to tools.

Update Manager Repository

For Update Manager, the easiest way to get the HP updates into Update Manager and onto hosts is to point to a new repository in the Update Manager tool. Adding an additional repository in Update Manager must be done through the Configuration tab of the Update Manager settings using the traditional Windows vSphere Client. It doesn’t appear to be configurable in the vSphere Web Client.

Navigate to Solutions and Applications and choose Update Manager.
On the Configuration tab, under Settings, click Download Settings.
In the Download Sources pane, select Direct connection to Internet.
Click Add Download Source.
In the Add Download Source window, type the new download source URL. For the HP repository, the URL will be http://vibsdepot.hp.com/hpq/<release date>/index.xml.
Tip: You may navigate to http://vibsdepot.hp.com/hpq/ to see a directory list of all the release dates.
Click Validate URL to verify that the URL is accessible.
Click OK and then Apply.

Once you have setup the custom repository, click Download and let those updates be imported into Update Manager. Once imported, rescan your hosts and now the HP customized tools will also be remediated during patching.

Update Manager Manual Import

Alternatively, you can download the individual zip files of the updates from the http://vibsdepot.hp.com website and import the individual updates into your local Update Manager library. Once imported, make sure these updates are included in a baseline and attached to a host and rescan the host. The new patches will show up and you’ll be able to remediate the hosts with these patches.

ESXCLI

For users who want to script, who want or need to use ESXCLI, one additional line will pull down and deploy the updates from an HP release to your ESX hosts:

[code]esxcli software vib install -d http://vibsdepot.hp.com/hpq/<release date>/index.xml[/code]

Just replace the <release date> in the URL with a correct release date to point to an active repository.

Limited Time Only

With both Update Manager and ESXCLI, keep in mind that you’ve configured and/or remediated against a single, point-in-time HP repository, so you will also need to add new repositories as the patches change and new updates are released from HP. You may navigate to http://vibsdepot.hp.com/hpq/ to see a directory list of all the release dates. Configuring against a single release is the recommended HP method to ensure you get the correct patches according to the recipe for your ESXi patch level.

Recipes

HP also releases a list of recipes for which version of tools and drivers work with which version of ESXi and its patch levels. These recipes give administrators additional validation that the tools loaded have been tested with the ESXi patch level and everything should run correctly together. The recipes are available on the same site with the patches and downloads at http://vibsdepot.hp.com. The PDF recipes highlight more than just the software aspect of the ESXi and HP tool integration – it also highlights the firmware levels desired by ProLiant make and model to ensure that everything has been tested together.

April 22, 2014 3 comments

Home Lab Home Tech

Home lab update for Christmas

by Philip Sellers January 1, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

This Christmas, I stumbled upon a full height rack at a local closeout warehouse. My wife and I like to shop second-hand or closeout stores – we have a couple in our area that deal in merchandise from big box stores that didn’t move at clearance or were slightly damaged. We have had good luck finding deals in the past – like my HD video camera (still worth more on eBay than I paid 4 years ago), my TV/Mac Pro 27″ monitor (under $100 a year ago) and toys for the kids.

Saturday, I had one of those finds. I had seen an ad on Craiglist and I thought the photo showed a server rack, but I wasn’t sure. The description was generic and so my wife and I decided to check it out. This was a new business (to us) we had not been to before, but we will be returning. They seemed to have a lot of nice quality stuff and tucked in a back corner, I spotted the rack. My hunch was confirmed, it was a metal 42U rack with door. It was clear the owners didn’t know what they had – the wife even asking what I planned to use it for – she said she had so many ideas. We should have asked how she would use it! It was priced at $100. It included two generic set of rails to hold a rack-mount server and two slide out shelves – an additional bonus. The metal alone was probably worth over $100, if recycled… So, we bought it and brought it home.

I was able get it into the house – thanks to a neighbor’s helping hand – and it is very well made and heavy! I rolled it into my office and it cleared the door with just a millimeter to spare. I’ve mounted some of my lab equipment in the rack and some other pieces are still works in progress.

I didn’t really have room in my office for a full rack, but at that price, it was difficult to say no. I like having the door for noise reduction and it gives me plenty of room to expand. I’ll probably run out of power before I run out of space. A rack has been on my wish list for a while for the home lab I’m slowly building. I had searched eBay and other places and I could fine 12U or 18U racks – mostly audio racks – for around $150-$170, but not a server depth rack. I’ve found some really cool vintage racks and equipment that has been removed from use on eBay – unfortunately, most racks either ship freight for a couple hundred dollars or are local pickup only in locations on the west coast. I had not been able to find anything relatively local on eBay.

I rearranged my office to make room for the new rack and so far, its working really well. The sliding shelves inside the rack were perfect for holding my HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 and PS1810 switch. I need a pair of mounting brackets for my Procurve 2510 switch. I had also found a SuperMicro 1U rackmount chassis on eBay for under $50, so I picked it up a few months ago. Now that I have the rack, I decided to move my whitebox server into a rackmount chassis. Although I like my PowerMac G4 mod, the cabling inside did not work out like I wanted and the wires were hitting the cooling fan on the processor from time to time – not a good situation.

Happy New Year!

January 1, 2014 2 comments

Compute Datacenter Storage

HP bundling StoreVirtual VSA with new ProLiant purchases

by Philip Sellers December 6, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

HP is bringing software defined storage to the masses by bundling the StoreVirtual VSA (virtual storage appliance) with the purchase of new ProLiant hardware. The new offer, announced November 12, is available with 10 models of ProLiant and includes a 1TB entitlement for StoreVirtual VSA. That license can be combined on up to 3 nodes for a total capacity of 3TB of total storage in a free software SAN. And although the license is limited to 3 nodes within the StoreVirtual cluster, the storage can be made accessible to any connected servers in the site.

The new offer is attractive for small office or enterprise remote office deployments where typically only a few servers are deployed. HP is targeting the SMB market with the new offer in an attempt to gain market for the StoreVirtual software defined storage line of products according to Dale Degen, category manager for Software Defined Storage at HP.

“I’m pretty excited because this will expand the scope of who has been exposed to this concept,” Degen said during a call this week.

Chock full of features

The free 1TB licenses are no gimmick. The licenses include the full package of StoreVirtual capabilities, excluding Adaptive Optimization. Those capabilities include large enterprise features like asynchronous replication, snapshots, thin provisioning, network RAID and storage clustering. The only thing not included with the 1TB license is HP’s Adaptive Optimization feature for sub-LUN tiering and support. Users who want support for the StoreVirtual can upgrade to a retail copy of StoreVirtual, with pricing beginning at $3,000 list for 3 nodes of 4TB each and includes 3 years of support. Although the free licenses are limited to 3 node clusters, customers are free to create multiple clusters and the StoreVirtual Centralized Management Console manages multiple storage clusters easily, which is a great benefit to larger companies who may have StoreVirtual storage at both primary and remote sites.

The free licenses are easy to obtain, according to Degen. Any of the eligable ProLiant servers shipping after November 1 include a sticker with a key that can be used to unlock the license from the HP website. Customers can take their keys and and fulfill the request, download the VSA software package and retrieve the licenses.

From personal experience, the deployment process of the StoreVirtual VSA is very easy. Users can obtain the ‘Zero to VSA’ toolkit, as Degen called it, from the HP website which offers a streamlined deployment process for the VSA. In my lab environment, the manual deployment steps took about 10 minutes – mostly pointing the wizard to your vSphere or Hyper-V environment and then letting it push out the appliance. Deegan also said that the Zero to VSA toolkit includes a CLI environment which could let power users automate the deployment in enterprise environments.

SMB users: what is StoreVirtual and what’s a VSA?

Many SMB users may not have heard of HP StoreVirtual and may be wondering what it is all about. At a high level, StoreVirtual takes the local storage inside of a server and uses software to pool the storage and offering it up as an iSCSI based SAN. Multiple servers deployed with StoreVirtual also pool together and replicate among each other to create a RAIN (redundant array of independent nodes) configuration. Like RAID, RAIN is the concept of stripes or mirrors for the data between nodes. StoreVirtual is a software-only solution, although HP also sells hardware solutions created around StoreVirtual software. Originally created by Lefthand Networks, the StoreVirtual continues to run the Lefthand OS on bare metal installs and inside of the VSA or virtual storage appliance. Lefthand OS, formerly known as SAN/iQ, is currently at verison 11 and is a very mature product in a market full of new solutions.

StoreVirtual’s feature set is also on par with much larger enterprise storage platforms, but by utilizing existing storage or servers, it offers a much lower price point for many customers looking for SAN storage. Virtualization and particuarlly vSphere have pushed many SMB users to look towards SAN solutions to accommodate virtual workloads and provide highly available storage.

The VSA (virtual storage appliance) concept is an outgrowth of the Lefthand OS within a virtual machine. Like installing Lefthand OS on bare metal hardware, the VSA uses onboard, local storage under the ESXi or Hyper-V hypervisor and creates pools on this storage so that it can be served up for any number of uses on the network, but many times that use case is to store virtual machines. While the VSA can present storage back to its local virtual host machines, it can also be used by any other server or virtual host with connectivity to its SAN network.

Sounds great, how to I get it?

For all the latest information about the offer, about StoreVirtual VSA and about how to take advantage, go to the HP website at http://hp.com/go/FreeVSA.

December 6, 2013 0 comments

Compute Datacenter Home Lab

Review: HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8 has big biz features in a small biz box

by Philip Sellers November 17, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

Its been two months since my HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8 arrived and I’ve had an opportunity to run it in a couple different configurations. Out of the box, Windows Server Essentials 2012 came pre-installed on my eval unit and on first boot, configuration kicked off to setup and configure an Active Directory domain and setup all the basics of a small office deployment.

Procs & RAM

First, I am really glad that HP chose to move to Intel processors for the Gen8 model of the MicroServer. Their AMD processors in the G7 model was probably the only reason that I did not purchase one of those units before. For some reason, I along with many other administrators just have a disposition towards Intel processors instead of AMD. When speaking with Shad Madina, Group Manager for Portfolio Planning and Solutions at HP, he also shared that HP found the AMD processors to be a sticking point with domestic buyers, although the AMD processors seemed to be well accepted in Europe.

The processors in the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 are more along the lines of desktop processors rather than the normal Xeon processors normally found in servers. The lower end server features Intel Celeron processors and the higher end Gen8 model features a Pentium processor. Both models feature dual core models but unfortunately there is not even an option for a quad-core model at this time. As I covered earlier, the Gen8 model raises the RAM limit to 16GB which helps to accommodate a wider range of opportunities in the market, including small virtualization farms.

Hide and go RAID

I knew from the spec sheets that the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 included a SATA RAID controller in the unit, however, during boot and the initial OS load, I noticed that it did not mention anything about Smart Array or offer a management interface to access and provision RAID sets like the larger Proliants do. This is simply because the embedded SATA controller is turned on by default and the RAID SATA controller is not enabled. A quick trip through the BIOS turned up the option to enable the Dynamic SATA controller and after a reboot and POST, I was able to login to Intelligent Provisioning and create RAID sets from the drives I had installed.

When I spoke with Madina, he was quick to point out that HP purposefully decided when designing the MicroServer to have a different set of trade-offs than were normal. The normal trade-offs were basic functionality, like RAID, cut for the sake of saving money. With the MicroServer, one of the trade-offs is the lack of hot-swappable hard drives and bays. This is a bit of a bummer but its a small price to pay when HP didn’t want to compromise other basic necessities.

Noise, or lack thereof

HP touts the quietness of the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 saying that it is quieter than a laptop. This is certainly the case. Today, when I walked into my office, I actually had to check and ensure that it was on and running because I could not hear any noise coming from the unit. Now, this is after the MicroServer has been on and settled down. At boot, like its big-brothers, the Proliant MicroServer sound like a jet ready for take off – but after POST completes and the system begins booting, things quiet down to a negligible level.

My first week with the MicroServer was a slightly different story, however. When I first received the unit and powered it up, I thought it was fairly noisy, especially for someone touted to be under 20db of noise. But, my first week’s experience was a fluke of some kind – because once I shut it down to explore inside and then booted it again, the noisiness was nowhere to be found.

I will go on to say, that after testing the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 and comparing it with my home-built server, I prefer the MicroServer hand-down and big reason is how much quieter this unit is than my server.

Virtualization friendly

After a month of exploring the MicroServer while running Windows Server Essentials 2012, I reinstalled the server to run ESXi and this is how I plan to keep the system running in the future. The demo unit I received came with the maximum 16GB of RAM loaded. This is a very welcome configuration for running a lab ESXi install. I was able to install the HP OEM version of ESXi onto the MicroServer which included additional agents inside the OS.

ESXi installs flawlessly onto the MicroServer Gen8. There were no special drivers or hoops to jump through to make it work on this hardware.

Even though the MicroServer Gen8 received a RAM limit boot, I wish still it had gone higher or that it accepted 4 x 8GB DIMM instead of two. 32GB of RAM and even better 64GB would greatly broaden the virtualization use cases for many customers. Still, 16GB is sufficient for many test and lab environments to be able to test many solutions.

Remote Management, sort-of

One of the nice surprises in the unit is the inclusion of a full iLO4 chip on the motherboard. This replaces the optional remote management card which came with the G7 models of MicroServer. The iLO4 is much more capable and potentially useful than the previous remote management cards, however the one let-down was the unit comes with iLO Standard only, which does not support virtual media and remote console, except during boot. To get the additional features, an iLO Essentials or iLO Advanced license is needed.

HP has introduced iLO Essentials licensing and targets it directly at SMB users who want remote management. iLO Essentials license includes fully functional remote console, virtual media and email alerts for $129. Its a small tax to get basic remote management functionality and its better than the requirement to purchase iLO Advanced license for $299, since most small businesses would not use the additional features that iLO Advanced brings. iLO Advanced brings features like recording remote console sessions, authentication from directory services, multi-user remote console (for collaboration) and advanced alerting options. (For a full comparison of licensing levels and features included, see this PDF from HP).

iLO Standard is not useless, however. There is a lot that iLO does with no additional license — agent-less hardware management, remote support, remote power buttons, and the embedded health systems. The onboard system integrates with HP’s Insight Online service to allow administrators to manage and view all their systems and health through a central portal for free.

But, I will say I expected remote console and virtual media to be included, so it was let-down here. However, here is a pro-tip for you – make sure to check secondary markets (eBay) for these licenses. It may be possible to pickup iLO Advanced license for less than you can buy the iLO Essentials license.

PS1810-8G Switch

I am really happy with the PS1810-8G switch. I like the way that it compliments the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 and its space saving for my home lab. 8 ports accommodates three home servers easily and allows for some room to grow. The VLAN support helps partition traffic among my servers so that I can segment video traffic away from web and management traffic and then keep my normal browsing, Netflix and home operations separate from my lab environment.

Pricing

Pricing for the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 starts at just $449 with an Intel Celeron G1610T processor and 2GB of RAM. The higher end server is priced at $529 and comes with an Intel Pentium G2020T processor and 2GB of RAM. Bundles are available with the PS1810-8G switch and are priced at $634 and $714 respectively directly from HP.

Verdict

I would score the HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8 a solid 8.5 out of 10. On the plus side, it is quiet, power-efficient and well suited for out-of-datacenter uses that most businesses have. I think there are so many remote-office and branch-office uses for the server beyond just the small and medium business markets.

On the downsides, I wish the processors were quad-core instead of dual-core. I also wish the RAM could be expanded beyond 16GB. But the downsides really stop there. Dual gigabit NICs are very capable and if you required more, there is a PCI expansion slot that could accommodate up to an additional 4 ports. The PCI slot could also be used for HBA or other peripherals as required.

The pricing of the systems also puts this in a sweet spot for many small businesses who don’t have dedicated IT budgets. I’ve worked with a lot of small business and for entry level servers, its a hard sell with a $1,200 to $1,500 server. The MicroServer represents a very compelling additional option for a lot of use cases.

I’m very impressed with the system overall. I think its a fantastic choice for a lot of small business and remote office use cases. I’m impressed enough that I plan to buy a second unit for home to use as a lab system in the near future. I’ll discuss why I’d choose this over a whitebox build in a later post another day.

Now, go win one…

Its your turn now to win a bundle just like my eval bundle for your home or small office or your remote office needs. Its very easy to win – just head over to our Giveaway page for all the details on the contest and you could be a winner. And keep in mind, there are two other bloggers giving away the same bundle the same time as Techazine – make sure to go and enter there too.

Disclaimer: HP provided me with both the HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8 and the HP PS1810-8G for review at no charge. The opinions and views of the hardware written here are entirely my own and HP had no say in what I choose to write. The hardware came with no strings attached.

November 17, 2013 61 comments

Compute Datacenter Storage

How the HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8 came to life

by Philip Sellers November 7, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

ReviewMicroserver

I’m a big fan of product history, how products develop and come to life. This is the story of how the HP Proliant MicroServers came to be. I spoke with Shad Madina, Group Manager, Portfolio Planning and Solutions at HP and he offered a bit of insight on how HP developed its MicroServer.

Why a MicroServer

When the folks at HP began looking at the market, it saw a large amount of growth in the small to medium business market and that sparked the question – how does HP target this fast growing segment? According to Madina, HP staff began researching small and medium businesses and found that most of the server options they had within their price range were stripped down versions of larger servers, which often removed great functionality for the sake of price. HP also found that the majority of small businesses bought their technology through channel partners or as a bundled solution along with software and services while looking to solve a particular problem.

In addition to buying habits, HP also found that most small and medium businesses placed these servers under a desk or on a tabletop and that they were not found in a datacenter or server room. This made traditional servers an imperfect fit because of the noise and heat they produce was not well suited for where they were being placed.

So HP began developing a new server with different trade-offs. They wanted to create a server that would meet small and medium business needs without compromising function. The new server would need to be quieter than a normal server, be channel friendly, and be power and heat conscious.

Meet the MicroServer

c03690405 With this information, HP introduced the first Proliant MicroServers in 2010. Equipped with AMD Athalon N36L, N40L, and N54L processors as options, each unit could add up to 8TB of storage (4 x 2TB drives) and 8GB of DDR3 ECC RAM. It included 6 USB 2.0 ports, 1 eSATA port and 1 Gigabit Ethernet portand an optional remote management card akin to iLO. The first MicroServer was quiet, touting less than 21db of noise emitted and it ran on standard 110 power.

While the units met all of HP’s objectives, they were not a huge hit in the US. They proved to be much more successful in Europe but the decision to equip them with AMD processors was often a sticking point for domestic customers.

HP learned a number of lessons from customers with the first models of MicroServer. Customers found use cases beyond HP’s original intentions, with many IT professionals choosing to use the MicroServer as a virtualization hardware for small deployments or home labs.

Meet the Gen8 MicroServer

This past summer, HP introduced the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 to the public. The new model integrated a number of lessons learned from the previous models. For the new generation, HP moved to Intel processors, choosing a dual-core Celeron processor for the low-end and a Core i3 processor for the higher end model. The standard RAM configuration is 2GB with a higher RAM limit at 16GB to better accommodate the virtualization use cases and needs for more RAM in database or other uses. The Gen8 MicroServer also include dual Gigabit network adapters onboard with one expansion PCI slot. The new model still comes with 4 drive bays, but now supports 3TB SATA drives for up to 12TB of total storage. With these changes, HP is betting on better results domestically by accommodating more uses it’s customers found with the previous generation.

HP added an on-board iLO port as standard configuration on each unit. Unlike the optional remote management card, the iLO would be the same iLO 4 that HP features across the entire Proliant Gen8 line. They also introduced a licensing level called iLO Essentials for $149 which gives MicroServer and small to medium business customers core iLO functionality they want without the increased cost of iLO Advanced licensing. iLO Essentials includes remote console, virtual media and email notifications from the system. iLO4 is also the underlying technology which allows the MicroServer Gen8 to connect with Insight Online, HP’s cloud support service, and enables HP Insight Remote Support.

HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8 on display at HP Discover 2013. In the foreground, there are 3 color options available for the door, including the standard silver found on all Proliant Gen8 models.

The entire Proliant Gen8 line has a prominent design feel featuring aluminum bezels on each model that cover the drive slots and indicators. That design was carried over to the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 model with HP going further by introducing optional colored bezels for the MicroServer. While intended for simple design flare, customers found the colored bezels were useful in the field for standardizing and identifying hardware for particular use cases. Madina said that one customer uses the bezel to “color code based on the task to allow uniform identification” by color.

November 7, 2013 1 comment

Datacenter Home Lab Home Tech Projects Storage

Endless possibilities for a MicroServer

by Philip Sellers October 1, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

ReviewMicroserver

Lots and lots of Possibilities

This weekend, I was able to get the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 setup and powered on in my lab. Its currently burning in and I’m doing some testing with it. What do I think? Well, you’ll have to wait until I have had more time with it before I share my impressions. But that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about use cases.

Use Case – Creating a Lab environment

Beyond the stylish exterior, the HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8 can fit into a lot of possible environments and use cases. The first one that comes to mind is my own – the home lab. As an IT professional, its become imperative that I have a lab environment at home where I can test software and solutions. I have gotten lots of offers for trials and software from blogging and for solving my problems at work.

Many of my peers build their own whitebox systems and I have attempted recently, too. I hadn’t built a computer in close to a decade. And my first experience trying to build a whitebox has been bumpy. I’ll admit, I have enjoyed using a soldering iron again, but it can be frustrating trying to piece together a compatible solution. I’d prefer to buy something ready made and that makes the MicroServer Gen8 really compelling to me. Time is valuable, so the time I’ve spent tinkering could have been more productive if I just bought a ready-made system.

Use Case – Networked Storage

With four drive bays, the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 is capable of up to 12TB of storage on board with 3TB drives in each bay. That makes it a viable candidate as a NAS solution for home or business. There are so many implementations like FreeNAS and Openfiler to turn the MicroServer into a NAS appliance.

In addition to just file sharing, these software storage solutions have lots of add-on functionality to take basic file storage and make it useful in the home for being your media repository of movies, TV shows and music and being the source for streaming to your TV-connected box, your Android or iPhone or even some home stereo systems. Add-on a VPN solution and it becomes your personal media cloud when you’re away from home, too. FreeNAS can also serve as a destination for TimeMachine or other backup software solutions, so now not only primary storage but backup of your PCs and Macs.

Even again in a home lab situation, NAS distributions support iSCSI and NFS, making the MicroServer a viable storage target for VMware and other virtualization in a lab environment. The NAS proposition has uses in so many ways. In a lot of ways, this use case of a Proliant MicroServer offers a better performing and possibly lower cost alternative to a Synology or Drobo NAS device. And if your needs change, you can alway repurpose or hand-me-down this server, where the others are only ever capable of being a NAS.

Use Case – Virtual Host

Running a hypervisor on the MicroServer should just be reserved for the lab – its capable of prime time. A lot of small businesses don’t have space or need for racks, rackmount hardware or even pedestal servers. In many cases, these small businesses run on three to five physical servers anyways, so consolidating these aging physical servers to two or three MicroServers would allow the business to save power and footprint.

The Proliant MicroServer Gen8 has a remarkably small footprint, low power consumption and small heat output. It can easily sit on a desktop or a shelf and is not nearly as obtrusive as a tower, pedestal or rackmount server. While not as condensed as a blade, it could serve a similar purpose in a small business environment.

Use Case – Microbusiness

There are a lot of one and two person businesses and the number of micro businesses seems to have exploded in recent years. Perhaps its a combination of the Internet lowering the barriers of entry and the terrible economy pushing people out of traditional jobs. These businesses still have traditional needs and while many use the cloud, the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 offers a compelling self hosted solution at a price point that is competative to many cloud solutions. A micro business may need to file or print share, have a VPN or prehaps run Remote Desktop to host a local accounting or line of business application. And a MicroServer hosted onsite provides those features – along with the ability to access a Remote Desktop session from a mobile device on the road.

Use Case – App Server

A lot of small businesses who have either outgrown or need more tailored solutions than Quickbooks and those accounting packages usually require databases and other shared access. This server is more than capable of running SQL Express or full Microsoft SQL and an application on bare metal along with the application. Then there are all the customized line of business applications – from hotels, to legal, to doctor’s offices, restaurants and even mechanics. While a lot of these have cloud solutions, many companies still rely on installed, local software to run their business and a MicroServer fits nicely. Specifically thinking about point of sale in restaurants as a use case – having deployed several of those in my time – a compact server like this would be a welcome platform – especially at the price of these boxes.

Use Case – Policy, Accounts and Security in the Small Business

Then, there is always the business whose growing beyond the two or three person mark and needs to begin thinking about accounts, security and enforcing policy and automating some management. The Proliant MicroServer is great for a basic AD implementation, too. With a domain controller deployed, accounts and policy becomes possible, file shares can be more tightly secured and controlled and systems can be tied down to accounts that offer access from multiple devices. I implemented so many of these small office when I was a consultant. Managers or owners needed to lock down systems or ensure that only certain employees had access to some resources and AD makes that all possible. Add solutions like WSUS and patch management becomes streamlined and managed.

The biggest competition for MicroServer

But the biggest competition for the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 is cloud, possibly more than the bigger Proliants in the portfolio. Cloud adoption may be least resistant in the small business where the MicroServer aims for adoption. There are certainly a lot of businesses who are abandoning their client-server applications in favor of cloud solutions, but its not for everyone. But the days of client-server are far from over.

Disclaimer: HP provided me with both the HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8 for review at no charge. The opinions and views of the hardware written here are entirely my own and have not been influenced or outlined by HP. The hardware came with no strings attached.

October 1, 2013 3 comments

Compute Datacenter Home Tech Storage

Introducing the mystery product – an HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8

by Philip Sellers September 26, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

ReviewMicroserver

I teased you earlier that I had a special product coming to review and, today, I’m glad to announce that my HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8 has arrived. Since I had other things going on yesterday evening, I didn’t even get to unbox it, but it will be soon. So, you may be wondering – what is the Proliant MicroServer?

HP introduced the Proliant MicroServer line in 2010 as a general computing server platform aimed squarely at the micro to small business and home office markets. In June, the company released the Gen8 model which features a nice facelift and changes under the hood.

Like all of the Proliant Gen8 hardware, the MicroServer got a little bling treatment with an aluminum grille/door – making it a very sleek-looking unit. While the previous version looked like a generic half-sized tower, the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 is almost a perfect 9″ cube. It is equipped with either a Celeron G1610T or Pentium G2020T processor and can scale up to 12TB of storage and 16GB of RAM. Preconfigured models come with 2GB of RAM.

The Proliant Microserver Gen8 features a tool-less chassis, four cold-swap drive bays, a DVD drive, several USB ports inside, on the front and on the back of the server. Even though the form factor deviates from the norm, the inside of the Microserver is still very serviceable, upgradable and accessible.

And one of my favorite things with the MicroServer is, just like all other Proliant servers, it includes iLO – or Integrated Lights Out management for those who may not be as familiar with HP. iLO is HP’s flavor of an IP management interface (IPMI) and its a solid implementation for remote management for a server.

I’m very curious how this little guy compares to the ML, DL and BL Proliant models that I run in the datacenter. I’m curious to know if the iLO is as robust or scaled back, how the unit performs and how easily I will be able to integrate this into my ESX home lab.

A picture’s worth a thousand words…

I got my first look and feel at HP Discover earlier this year and I’ve posted a few photos below that I took of the show floor to whet your appetite. Don’t forget, one of these could be yours, too. More to come…

Disclaimer: HP provided me with the HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8 and also sponsored my trip to HP Discover this year. The opinions and views of the hardware written here are entirely my own and have not been influenced or outlined by HP. While they provided me with opportunities, those opportunities came with no strings attached.

September 26, 2013 4 comments

Compute Datacenter Storage Trends

HP releases Moonshot platform for high density, eco-friendly servers

by Philip Sellers April 14, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

Last Monday, HP released the new HP Moonshot platform, a new set of server products specifically built to take less space, less power and less operational cost than traditional servers in the datacenter. In Moonshot, HP is attempting to solve the issues data centers face today with finding ample power, finding space and cooling challenges.

HP Moonshot is moniker used for both the chassis and the server cards inside of the chassis. It is a similar concept to the blade servers HP and other vendors have produced, replacing the blade with a server card similar to what you’d see in a switch chassis.

HP Moonshot System The chassis itself is an oddly sized, 4.3U server enclosure and serves as the basis for the ecosystem with 45 slots for server cards and two network switches with shared power and cooling. The card based servers are a rethink of what defines a server – a small footprint system-on-a-card based around low power processors. As for space consolidation, HP says that what previously would have occupied 10 racks of 1U servers can be accommodated in a single rack with 10 Moonshot chassis.

The first set of Proliant Moonshot Servers are based around Intel Atom processors. Being x86-based, much of the world’s current server software should work with these new servers, something that will be key to adoption of the new form factor in the datacenter. In addition to these Intel Atom processors, HP also announced plans for tailored servers for specific business needs. These servers may be stocked with specific hardware for a task and future server will include ARM processors, too. The ARM based servers will likely require a lot of rewrites of applications for compatibility, but given the amount of experienced ARM developers for mobile, its not a stretch to consider server code being written on ARM.

Oddly (to me at least), HP has a requirement that all 45 server cards be identical in an enclosure according to the QuickSpecs found online for factor integrated models (thanks to Chris Wahl for that information). At launch, there is only a single Proliant Moonshot server card available. The requirement to buy a fully populated system is a clear sign that HP is targeting the Moonshot systems towards service providers and serious datacenters running lots of web applications on traditional server hardware. It is concerning for enterprise who tend to mix and match server models in blade enclosures to fit specific needs. Moonshot’s uniform requirement may limit its audiences.

Moonshot does not seem to be a play towards hardware for virtualization, but a play towards to scale-out Google and Facebook cloud architectures. Facebook has even gone as far as creating the Open Compute Project to help further its efforts to create low cost compute and storage nodes. It seems the goals of Moonshot may be in the same vein as Open Compute. Facebook’s idea is to scale out and replicate data across many nodes, using cheap and disposable server hardware to accommodate their workloads. Clearly, Moonshot’s server cards fit that bill.

Add to this the reduced consumption of power and that makes the relatively weaker processors more palatable for many buyers. Power may be the most expensive commodity for datacenters today and the reliance on electricity is only increasing year over year. Few companies have the resources or determination of Apple to power their datacenters with nearly 100% renewable power sources – like the Maiden,NC, datacenter. That means all other datacenters are at the mercy of the power grid and pricing from their local electricity providers.

HP Moonshot is definitely a new platform to watch. It will be interesting to see if it catches on as well as the blade servers and convergence that HP helped to usher into the industry.

April 14, 2013 0 comments

Compute Datacenter Storage

HP Discover 2012: HP introduces third generation of StoreOnce D2D backup devices

by Philip Sellers June 18, 2012

written by Philip Sellers

HP unveiled a third generation of StoreOnce devices targeted at improving backup and restore performance, StoreOnce redundancy and introducing a new interface to handle backups. The new StoreOnce B6200 was introduced last week at HP Discover. With the new B6200, customers will get a 2-node base configuration configured as a couplet (cluster) with seamless failover in case a single node fails. The B6200 can scale up to 4 couplets or 8 nodes in total with 768TB of raw storage (512TB usable). But the real magic of the new architecture if what customers will receive — improved speeds.

Still based on the industry-leading Proliant architecture, the latest generation pushes for speed in backups and recovery. In native backup mode, the StoreOnce B6200 will achieve speeds of 40TB per hour in backup and in restore in VTL mode. HP Storage vice president David Scott was quick to point out that the competition’s D2D backup devices take a 50% hit on restores versus the native backup speeds. The latest generation of StoreOnce is architected to ensure there was no performance loss for restores, when enterprise is really counting on the speed.

In addition to the impressive speeds, the StoreOnce B6200 also includes HP’s StoreOnce Catalyst software, which will allow for an incredible 150% improvement on backups speeds using the new native API, which sees the D2D devices for exactly what it is, rather than emulating virtual tape libraries. HP showcased this new technology on the showroom floor during HP Discover, last week, equating the speed of backup that would allow a customer to backup the Library of Congress three times in a single night. And those, are pretty impressive numbers.

The configurations use 2TB SAS drives in the storage enclosures. Each couplet scales up to 192TB of raw storage and 128TB of usable storage. But best of all, when fully populated, all 4 couplets are managed as a single device.

For existing customers, I spoke with engineers on the showroom floor that say the Catalyst software will likely come to older StoreOnce devices, though there is not a timeline. The Catalyst version of StoreOnce OS is based on a standard Linux kernel as opposed to earlier StoreOnce OS distributions that were based on a customized Linux distribution. HP is expected to unify these releases in the future.

Disclosure: HP sponsored my trip to HP Discover, covering all travel expenses, however HP does not control the content of the posts that I write based on my attendance to the show. The thoughts, impressions and information contained in this post are my own.

June 18, 2012 0 comments