Debating new home hardware
Thinking about buying a couple new servers for home, a new ESXi 4.1 server and aSolaris ZFS fileserver, Here is what I decided the requirements of the first server are.
ESXi server requirements
Fully supported on the VMware HCL
Dual socket, quad cores 4MB l2 caches per proc
8+GB of ram, system needs to support at least 32GB for future expandsionHardware raid controller (makes esxi happier)
At least 4x 3.5” sata drives (may consider 2.5” drives)
Dual gigabit Ethernet port.
3 years next day business hours hardware support
Out of band management nice to have
I have been doing computers for almost 30 years in one form or another building x86 gear since 1985, and frankly I’m tired of working on my home hardware, I want something that is pretty much plugNplay I don’t want to mess with the hardware and I don’t want to have to worry about replacing the system for 3 years by that point there should be some more interesting things going on. I am leaning towards a standard tower server they tend to be quieter than there rack mount cousins and don’t feel the need to pay the rack mount tax as well. I currently have a dl380 g3 that is very loud and has no slow fan speed mode at least in ESXi 3.5. The current sweet spot for cpus are quad core 2.13ghz, slower only saves $20 and faster is a price jump of over $100 per cpu. Upgrading my current ESX server will also allow me to run 64bit OSes and will give me the excuse to power down another server as well for the most part.
I looked at Supermicro systems but I don’t see much price difference between them and HP that offers everything from the system to full support perhaps I am not finding the right systems. Supermicro offers some systems with lots and lots of disks, which I don’t need for home. Also lacks support and enterprise out of band management features of HP.
I also looked at Dell but perhaps I didn’t find the comparable model but I really didn’t find a lower price for my configuration, and Dell seems to be a slightly less of a reputation with less enterprise quality add-ons so less stuff to play with. So Dell is out of the running.
I looked at Sun/Oracle x86 options but they seem to be limited to rackmount gear that only supports 2.5” sas drives and the prices were way more than I am looking at and there online configuration tool is offline so I couldn’t reduce the ram and drive size to see if that helps the price. I really want to go with a tower based system because they are quieter. Cheapest x86 server I can find is over $3000, almost double what I have budgeted.
The purely beige box solution seems appealing because of price but it is hard to find a website that offers complete configuration of systems with dual sockets and they will also lack high quality support and the enterprise out of band management features. I really don’t want to assemble my own hardware.
So far my choices for the ESXi server are either HP Proliant ml150 g6 or ml350 g6 I am leaning towards the ml350 because it comes out of the box with a 3year warranty and it doesn’t require extra licenses to support the same configurations that I may upgrade to in the future it’s a bit more but you can expand it further. With the ml150 I need to get the hot plug model so I get a raid controller that works with ESXi out of box, the low end integrated controller isn’t supported by ESXi.
The shocking things with my configuration at the HP website is that the ml350 is cheaper than the ml150, among other differences the ml350g5 supports both the e5606 and e5506 cpus as opposed to just the e5506 that the ml150 g6 supports, the e5606 is cheaper. The specs are the same for these two cpus, same speed, same l2 cache, same watts, after looking at the Intel site I see the e5506 uses 32nm press as opposed to the 45nm that the e5606 uses. Which I see on various websites not to add anything except slightly lower power usage, the e5606 is fine for me. The low power cpus are too expensive I don’t think I would save enough to make them a reasonable choice. I keep debating on whether to wait on the second cpu, I like the idea to buy it day one so that it comes installed and fully tested, I’m sure it will add some speed and memory expandability but I won’t be using all 8 cores for a while. I never really found dual 3.2 GHz p4 in my old esxi server to be limiting it was always about memory.
Adding the redundant hot swap fans seem to be a good choice, an extra $50 for security having a fan fail while at work or while away on an extended vacation which is the time most hardware seems to fail. Would lead to a shortened life span of the server perhaps keeping it cooler all along I’m not going to keep the server in an air conditioned space it will be in my basement that may see temperatures in the 80’s perhaps even 90’s a few days a year.
Both servers support more than enough drives I will be purchasing one drive from HP for ESXi probably a 250GB sata drive $90, the extra $20 compared the 160GB drives is worth it, Larger drives from HP are too expensive so I will be adding standard home grade drives, and buying enough empty drive spuds on ebay to add 3 more disks, a second 250GB for mirroring of the primary drive and then 2x 2TB SATA drives for storage of guests all configured in mirrored layout for data protection and my low usage level should make the higher enterprise drives unnecessary. These later drives may be added later. Another downfall of the ml150g6 is that if I add the second drive cage increasing the internal compacity to 8 drives from 4, I would need to upgrade to the 750watt psu a $175 upgrade plus the enablement kit a $200 increase which seems really excessive and pretty much puts the final nail in the ml150g6 configuration in this comparison. I don’t see a need for all 8x drives but I do like the option of doing it later. I have thought about going with sas drives but they are a bit more expensive for 3rd party drives and way more expensive from HP and are limited to 750GB currently. Frankly I don’t think I will see much speed difference because I won’t be pushing them hard with my work load, how much performance do 5 part time users need, and I can add more cache memory to the controller as well.
I would most likely be ordering the server with 2x 2GB dims for memory one dimm on each cpu as required by the hp website again the extra $20 between the 1 and 2GB dimms is worth it, and will be adding more 4GB dims from a 3rd party memory supplier, they are about $100 each and ½ the price of HP’s memory and I can remove them should it become an issue for service personel.
I will only be purchasing one 460watt power supply and possibly adding the second power supply off eBay later for redundancy.
Dual gigabit Ethernet is important because I can allocate one port to iscsi/nfs IO and the other used for regular network traffic . The ml350 has dual gigabit standard, the ml150 would need a pci-e card. Long term I may even decide to add a 3rd gigabit port the cards are cheap and getting cheaper by the day.
I also want hardware support for 3 years, by then I will be ready to replace the server, if I am not it should be at the point the where parts are dirt cheap and the parts should be easy to find no reason to pay more for a longer contract. The ml350 includes 3 years support, on the ml150 it’s a $188 dollar add-on. Adding the 4th year increases the price $280 which just too much for a server that old.
So in the end the ml350 wins because its nearly the same price out of box and then all the extras add up to making the ml150 more expensive and less expandable in the end.
Server two, Solaris ZFS server
Dual socket (because expandability is nice) but only one cpu installed
6x 3.5” drives, 2x small drives for OS and 4x 3rd party 2TB drives in raid 1+0 for a total usable of 4TB before compression
SSD for l2arc and slog 80GB added sometime in the future.
Dual gigabit or more
3 year support.
This server comes out a bit less since it only has one cpu, quad core because dual core options don’t save much money anyway.
I will buy with only 4GB on board memory and then add 3-4 more 4GB 3rd party memory mostly used for ZFS caching.
250GB sata drive purchased with the system, with 1 more 250GB later and 4x 2TB drives added for home storage, less than $100 for 50% more security and increased performance I will also try to buy from 2 different drive vendors for a slight increase of potential security because less chances to up with a bad drive lot taking out the zpool.
All the other arguments remain the same.
Now the question I have is, how much of a discount can I get if I purchase from a HP reseller, my two servers I will not be enough to get me a big discount but a 5% discount would be nice. Anyone know of HP reseller that give discounts and preferably local to the Milwaukee, WI area.
ESXi server requirements
Fully supported on the VMware HCL
Dual socket, quad cores 4MB l2 caches per proc
8+GB of ram, system needs to support at least 32GB for future expandsionHardware raid controller (makes esxi happier)
At least 4x 3.5” sata drives (may consider 2.5” drives)
Dual gigabit Ethernet port.
3 years next day business hours hardware support
Out of band management nice to have
I have been doing computers for almost 30 years in one form or another building x86 gear since 1985, and frankly I’m tired of working on my home hardware, I want something that is pretty much plugNplay I don’t want to mess with the hardware and I don’t want to have to worry about replacing the system for 3 years by that point there should be some more interesting things going on. I am leaning towards a standard tower server they tend to be quieter than there rack mount cousins and don’t feel the need to pay the rack mount tax as well. I currently have a dl380 g3 that is very loud and has no slow fan speed mode at least in ESXi 3.5. The current sweet spot for cpus are quad core 2.13ghz, slower only saves $20 and faster is a price jump of over $100 per cpu. Upgrading my current ESX server will also allow me to run 64bit OSes and will give me the excuse to power down another server as well for the most part.
I looked at Supermicro systems but I don’t see much price difference between them and HP that offers everything from the system to full support perhaps I am not finding the right systems. Supermicro offers some systems with lots and lots of disks, which I don’t need for home. Also lacks support and enterprise out of band management features of HP.
I also looked at Dell but perhaps I didn’t find the comparable model but I really didn’t find a lower price for my configuration, and Dell seems to be a slightly less of a reputation with less enterprise quality add-ons so less stuff to play with. So Dell is out of the running.
I looked at Sun/Oracle x86 options but they seem to be limited to rackmount gear that only supports 2.5” sas drives and the prices were way more than I am looking at and there online configuration tool is offline so I couldn’t reduce the ram and drive size to see if that helps the price. I really want to go with a tower based system because they are quieter. Cheapest x86 server I can find is over $3000, almost double what I have budgeted.
The purely beige box solution seems appealing because of price but it is hard to find a website that offers complete configuration of systems with dual sockets and they will also lack high quality support and the enterprise out of band management features. I really don’t want to assemble my own hardware.
So far my choices for the ESXi server are either HP Proliant ml150 g6 or ml350 g6 I am leaning towards the ml350 because it comes out of the box with a 3year warranty and it doesn’t require extra licenses to support the same configurations that I may upgrade to in the future it’s a bit more but you can expand it further. With the ml150 I need to get the hot plug model so I get a raid controller that works with ESXi out of box, the low end integrated controller isn’t supported by ESXi.
The shocking things with my configuration at the HP website is that the ml350 is cheaper than the ml150, among other differences the ml350g5 supports both the e5606 and e5506 cpus as opposed to just the e5506 that the ml150 g6 supports, the e5606 is cheaper. The specs are the same for these two cpus, same speed, same l2 cache, same watts, after looking at the Intel site I see the e5506 uses 32nm press as opposed to the 45nm that the e5606 uses. Which I see on various websites not to add anything except slightly lower power usage, the e5606 is fine for me. The low power cpus are too expensive I don’t think I would save enough to make them a reasonable choice. I keep debating on whether to wait on the second cpu, I like the idea to buy it day one so that it comes installed and fully tested, I’m sure it will add some speed and memory expandability but I won’t be using all 8 cores for a while. I never really found dual 3.2 GHz p4 in my old esxi server to be limiting it was always about memory.
Adding the redundant hot swap fans seem to be a good choice, an extra $50 for security having a fan fail while at work or while away on an extended vacation which is the time most hardware seems to fail. Would lead to a shortened life span of the server perhaps keeping it cooler all along I’m not going to keep the server in an air conditioned space it will be in my basement that may see temperatures in the 80’s perhaps even 90’s a few days a year.
Both servers support more than enough drives I will be purchasing one drive from HP for ESXi probably a 250GB sata drive $90, the extra $20 compared the 160GB drives is worth it, Larger drives from HP are too expensive so I will be adding standard home grade drives, and buying enough empty drive spuds on ebay to add 3 more disks, a second 250GB for mirroring of the primary drive and then 2x 2TB SATA drives for storage of guests all configured in mirrored layout for data protection and my low usage level should make the higher enterprise drives unnecessary. These later drives may be added later. Another downfall of the ml150g6 is that if I add the second drive cage increasing the internal compacity to 8 drives from 4, I would need to upgrade to the 750watt psu a $175 upgrade plus the enablement kit a $200 increase which seems really excessive and pretty much puts the final nail in the ml150g6 configuration in this comparison. I don’t see a need for all 8x drives but I do like the option of doing it later. I have thought about going with sas drives but they are a bit more expensive for 3rd party drives and way more expensive from HP and are limited to 750GB currently. Frankly I don’t think I will see much speed difference because I won’t be pushing them hard with my work load, how much performance do 5 part time users need, and I can add more cache memory to the controller as well.
I would most likely be ordering the server with 2x 2GB dims for memory one dimm on each cpu as required by the hp website again the extra $20 between the 1 and 2GB dimms is worth it, and will be adding more 4GB dims from a 3rd party memory supplier, they are about $100 each and ½ the price of HP’s memory and I can remove them should it become an issue for service personel.
I will only be purchasing one 460watt power supply and possibly adding the second power supply off eBay later for redundancy.
Dual gigabit Ethernet is important because I can allocate one port to iscsi/nfs IO and the other used for regular network traffic . The ml350 has dual gigabit standard, the ml150 would need a pci-e card. Long term I may even decide to add a 3rd gigabit port the cards are cheap and getting cheaper by the day.
I also want hardware support for 3 years, by then I will be ready to replace the server, if I am not it should be at the point the where parts are dirt cheap and the parts should be easy to find no reason to pay more for a longer contract. The ml350 includes 3 years support, on the ml150 it’s a $188 dollar add-on. Adding the 4th year increases the price $280 which just too much for a server that old.
So in the end the ml350 wins because its nearly the same price out of box and then all the extras add up to making the ml150 more expensive and less expandable in the end.
Server two, Solaris ZFS server
Dual socket (because expandability is nice) but only one cpu installed
6x 3.5” drives, 2x small drives for OS and 4x 3rd party 2TB drives in raid 1+0 for a total usable of 4TB before compression
SSD for l2arc and slog 80GB added sometime in the future.
Dual gigabit or more
3 year support.
This server comes out a bit less since it only has one cpu, quad core because dual core options don’t save much money anyway.
I will buy with only 4GB on board memory and then add 3-4 more 4GB 3rd party memory mostly used for ZFS caching.
250GB sata drive purchased with the system, with 1 more 250GB later and 4x 2TB drives added for home storage, less than $100 for 50% more security and increased performance I will also try to buy from 2 different drive vendors for a slight increase of potential security because less chances to up with a bad drive lot taking out the zpool.
All the other arguments remain the same.
Now the question I have is, how much of a discount can I get if I purchase from a HP reseller, my two servers I will not be enough to get me a big discount but a 5% discount would be nice. Anyone know of HP reseller that give discounts and preferably local to the Milwaukee, WI area.
posted by jamesd_wi at Tuesday, March 15, 2011
1 Comments:
I did the same thing this summer. I had a rack of equipment and decided to replace everything that I owned because it was aging rapidly.
I went with an HP quad-core laptop (i7) w/ 6GB ram, two 2U rackmount DELL servers for VMs (using vmware server) and a drobo. Everything has been working very well and I have a few partitions on the drobo. One is a samba share, another is an rsync server, so it's my "data dump" for tons of stuff and my 'satellite' machines just grab stuff when they need it. It works very well.
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