I'm using this, like some of the other reivewers, as a home VMware ESXi NAS deployment.
First off, there are a few things you might consider modifying. There's a 5.25" bay at the top of this for an optional add-in optical drive. The BIOS, however, has locked the drive header going from the motherboard to slow IDE speeds. Well, some enterprising folks out there figured out a way to modify the bios so you can enable that header to operate at full SATA speeds. Google can point you to it.
Now with the addition of an adapter, you can install two 2.5" SSD drives in the single 5.25" optical bay. One of then gets connected to the now full-speed sata port designated for the optical drive, and one gets connected out the back of the chassis to the eSATA port via a eSATA/SATA cable.
Now you can run six drives, the four main bays using 3.5" with two 2.5" drives(SSD) up top.
So I boot VMware ESXi via the USB port on the motherboard. The two SSD drives are seen as datastores, which boot up a VM running OpenIndianna(a variant of OpenSolaris). On top of this, runs a web based GUI front end of the ZFS file system called Napp-IT. There are lots of guides out there to help setup and configure OI and Napp-IT.
Once that boots, I present the four main bay disks to the OpenIndianna VM via Raw Device Mappings(RDM). OpenIndianna then serves them up as a single 4TB(raw) Zpool, formatted for redundancy down to to 3TB usable. If you don't know about ZFS, it's pretty amazing. It does everything most enterprise grade storage solutions does, like snapshotting, replication, even deduplication if you can spare the resources.
Now, OpenIndianna isn't all that big, so depending on the size of your SSD's you might be able to take it a step farther. I also boot, again mirrored, a VM containing PFSense. PFsense is an enterprise grade router/firewall/VPN gateway that puts most home routers to shame.
Another neat feature of ZFS file system, is the ability to specify a fast tier of drive space as read and/or write cache. So if you have extra SSD space, and you will, you can give your ZFS a really fast SSD cache of many GB if you like.
Now your ZFS is essentially a NAS and through Napp-IT, you can present that space as CIFS, NFS, or even FTP space. So not only can you just share files from it like a general file server, but you can present space back to VMware for booting up even more guest Operating systems. I get away with one more, for a total of three, but this is where my home Windows server comes in.
So that's not bad for a cheap little box, I've got it as my home router/firewall/vpn, my NAS, and a general windows platform.
Now, the CPU isn't meant to be the fastest thing in the world, but for most things, it's adequate. The out of the box RAM needs to be upgraded. It supports 8GB but there are lots of folks out there who have discovered that 16GB works great and if you know anything about VMware, RAM is usually a limiter before CPU, but in this case it's a toss up.
I really love this little server and I'm quite honestly amazed that a major vendor like HP devotes product space to what has to be a pretty niche market.
It's certainly not for everyone, but even with the add-on's, this is a terrific price point. VMware infrastructure hosting an enterprise grade router-firewall, an enterprise grade NAS, and whatever else you deem appropriate to squeeze in to what space is left is pretty amazing for something close to the size of a toaster-oven!
I wish they'd sell it bare-bones, without a drive or RAM, as the first thing you'll want to do is probably buy more RAM and bigger drives.
All in all though, there's just almost nothing else in this market that even comes close and I did my best to look, I hope more manufacturers realize there's a market for this level of "Microserver"
| Processor | Turion_II_Neo_X2_Dual_Core_L625 |
|---|---|
| RAM | 2 GB |
| Hard Drive | 250 GB |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 6 |
