gshaw Posted June 21, 2011 Posted June 21, 2011 Was just looking at the offers on the HP Microserver at the moment and had a random thought of making an inexpensive backup server that we can keep away from the server room. Was thinking of dropping 4 x 2TB disks into the internal slots then maybe using another drive in the optical slot for OS (or depending on if I can carve the 4 x 2TB RAID up make a partition from that). Would give me about 5TB of space which should hold a decent amount of backup data. Could use DPM 2010 and just set it to back up the servers with our main file shares, Exchange etc on and leave Veeam to do full DR-style VM backups from our VMWare servers. That way I should have two backup systems which would make me feel happier than having all eggs in one basket. What you reckon, nice idea or a bit pointless?
tonyd Posted June 21, 2011 Posted June 21, 2011 Just been wondering exactly the same thing myself! But, had thought then new 3TB disks would give better future proofing. Only real shame is that there is no onboard RAID5, and I'm not sure how well the software RAID would work with a 1.3Ghz CPU... Guess if you where to add a RAID card then performance could be good enough, but even with some of those I've seen slow write times, e.g. 20Mb/s...
Ric_ Posted June 21, 2011 Posted June 21, 2011 With DPM, you can just point your jobs at an unused bit of disk and it will use it... there's no need to use RAID unless you are paranoid about disk failure. The disk backup is only meant to be short term though anyway, with the idea being that you dump off onto tape or something for archiving. You could also add more disks via eSATA if you so wished.
sted Posted June 21, 2011 Posted June 21, 2011 they arnt fast ive got one at home with 3gb ram and another in a school basically the same. Both are configged with the 250 drive it came with (or in mine a 300 i had lying around) in the optical bay (be aware to do this you need a molex to sata power adapter 5.25" to 3.5" mounting rails and a fairly bendy sata cable) and 4*2tb seagate drives in the main bays. The onboard raid controller is raid 0/1 only (the web interface does allow raid 10 BUT DONT USE IT as as soon as you reboot it denies all knowledge of any array) so both are set up with 2 2tb raid 1 drives (yes both are backup servers and i could probably of got away with raid 0 or no raid at all as all teh data is stored somewhere else as well). Both are running server 2008r2 sp1 standard editionthe school one seems faster but i did enable aero and gadgets on mins so it looks like a win7 box which cant be helping it. obvious question whats dpm2010 (if its ms i probably have access to it on technet and am willing to try it if that helps (bear in mind it will be on my home pc so while its all gb networked its not enterprise class kit
Arthur Posted June 21, 2011 Posted June 21, 2011 You could also add more disks via eSATA if you so wished. The eSATA port on the MicroServer doesn't support port multipliers, so you would be limited to a single HDD unless you bought a low-profile PCIe x1 eSATA card such as the Lycom PE-108.
Arthur Posted June 21, 2011 Posted June 21, 2011 Guess if you where to add a RAID card then performance could be good enough, but even with some of those I've seen slow write times, e.g. 20Mb/s... Not an issue if you buy a decent RAID card e.g. Adaptec RAID 6405 / 6805. Both are configured with the 250GB drive it came with (or in mine a 300 I had lying around) in the optical bay Did you flash the modified BIOS which enables AHCI for the optical drive SATA port? Without it, it's limited to around 23MB/s.
gshaw Posted June 21, 2011 Author Posted June 21, 2011 (edited) I was thinking you can get an HP RAID card and plug the backplane into that, should give "proper" RAID. Was thinking of the P212 or P410 controller then cutting the RAID into a boot partition then data partition, seems to be what rsutoratosu has here... HP ProLiant MicroServer owners' thread - Page 10 - [H]ard|Forum Downside being the card costs more than the server, although I guess it's still neater than having a something like an ML110 doing the same thing. Could also do a QNAP as well I guess but they seem to come in at a similar price to the Microserver but without the capability of running the backup software... Edited June 21, 2011 by gshaw
sted Posted June 21, 2011 Posted June 21, 2011 Not an issue if you buy a decent RAID card e.g. Adaptec RAID 6405 / 6805. Did you flash the modified BIOS which enables AHCI for the optical drive SATA port? Without it, it's limited to around 23MB/s. wjile you may be able to fit a 1/2 height raid card the motherboard connector for the tray drives is a propriety thing so you will have to work out how to recable the back bios is stock seems to run fast enough drive wise
Arthur Posted June 21, 2011 Posted June 21, 2011 the motherboard connector for the tray drives is a propriety thing so you will have to work out how to recable the back The connector on the MicroServer's motherboard is a standard SFF-8087 Mini-SAS port so all you would need to do is connect the cable which comes from the drive bay backplane and plug it directly into your RAID card. This is why I mentioned those Adaptec cards.
sted Posted June 21, 2011 Posted June 21, 2011 (edited) The connector on the MicroServer's motherboard is a standard SFF-8087 Mini-SAS port so all you would need to do is connect the cable which comes from the drive bay backplane and plug it directly into your RAID card. This is why I mentioned those Adaptec cards. fair enough ive never seen one before for what its worth a quick disassemble http://www.stedscarpics.net/edugeek/microserver/IMG_9096.JPG http://www.stedscarpics.net/edugeek/microserver/IMG_9097.JPG http://www.stedscarpics.net/edugeek/microserver/IMG_9098.JPG http://www.stedscarpics.net/edugeek/microserver/IMG_9099.JPG http://www.stedscarpics.net/edugeek/microserver/IMG_9100.JPG http://www.stedscarpics.net/edugeek/microserver/IMG_9101.JPG http://www.stedscarpics.net/edugeek/microserver/IMG_9102.JPG http://www.stedscarpics.net/edugeek/microserver/IMG_9103.JPG http://www.stedscarpics.net/edugeek/microserver/IMG_9104.JPG http://www.stedscarpics.net/edugeek/microserver/IMG_9105.JPG http://www.stedscarpics.net/edugeek/microserver/IMG_9106.JPG if any use i have the higher res ones Edited June 21, 2011 by sted
Arthur Posted June 21, 2011 Posted June 21, 2011 Now this is cool! Someone on the Overclockers Australia Forums has built a 20TB MicroServer using 5 x 3TB 3.5" HDDs and 5 x 1TB 2.5" HDDs. Personally, I would have bought a dual 3.5" OWC Multi-Mount adapter to make it 21TBs with 7x3TB drives! http://i.imgur.com/h10Xu.jpg @sted. Thanks for posting your pics.
gshaw Posted June 22, 2011 Author Posted June 22, 2011 Hmmm I'm very tempted to do this, only thing is whether the onboard cable stretches far enough to the P212 RAID card. Definitely would want some sort of hardware RAID on there for performance and data security...
Arthur Posted June 22, 2011 Posted June 22, 2011 I had a quick look inside my MicroServer and think it's very unlikely the onboard cable will reach the port on the HP P212. http://i.imgur.com/2v86W.jpg Ideally you would want the port(s) on the edge on the card closest to you... http://i.imgur.com/I0doF.jpg
sted Posted June 22, 2011 Posted June 22, 2011 and the cards mentioned all cost more than the box lol as to the ahci flash seems to be worthwhile on mine seems to boot faster etc (might be a placebo but meh) but while i dont mind adding non stock bios to mine (though id rather not) i wont be doing it to a schools one might consider adding a low profile hdmi video card to it though and using it a media centre
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