Maxing out HP N40L

[j***@cos.ru]

Hello all,

I think about building an illumos-based N40L (or similar home storage) which is quite popular in our ranks, for storage and virtualization and development hopefully. I expect to max out the ram with supported 8gb or allegedly working 16, and use 2.5" disk bays in place of the ODD bay.

My main question at the moment is - What did others do and reach, and was it on "home budget"?

Did anyone make use of 4tb hdds (and can raidz1 be reasonably used with 4 of those?), what hba's would be suggested for these and/or 2.5" disks (i thought of relatively small consumer ssd's for rpool/l2arc/zil, or possibly an rpool on extra couple of laptop hdd's); did anyone use remote console cards, or anything else weirdly interesting? :)

Thanks,
//Jim Klimov

Typos courtesy of my Samsung Mobile



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[Ray Van Dolson]

Post by j***@cos.ru
Hello all,
I think about building an illumos-based N40L (or similar home storage) which is
quite popular in our ranks, for storage and virtualization and development
hopefully. I expect to max out the ram with supported 8gb or allegedly working
16, and use 2.5" disk bays in place of the ODD bay.
My main question at the moment is - What did others do and reach, and was it on
"home budget"?
Did anyone make use of 4tb hdds (and can raidz1 be reasonably used with 4 of
those?), what hba's would be suggested for these and/or 2.5" disks (i thought
of relatively small consumer ssd's for rpool/l2arc/zil, or possibly an rpool on
extra couple of laptop hdd's); did anyone use remote console cards, or anything
else weirdly interesting? :)
Thanks,
//Jim Klimov

I have the N36L and it's a great little box, but I'd probably build
something or look elsewhere if I had it to do over.

Either because it carries the "ProLiant" brand or just... because --
parts for this thing are ridiculously expensive. My PSU failed and
it's over $200 to replace it. eBay prices aren't much better.

I can hook up a standard ATX power supply of course, but obviously it
doesn't fit properly and I need to have the case wide open. Blech.

So, I guess it would be a good option if you get the multi-year
warranty. :)

My $0.02 anyway. Maybe things are different with the N40L.

Ray

[Eugen Leitl]

Post by Ray Van Dolson
I have the N36L and it's a great little box, but I'd probably build
something or look elsewhere if I had it to do over.

I wouldn't. The N36L/N40L/N54L are really really cheap, considering
what you'd pay to build an ECC-capable low-power quiet NAS with
4-6x 3.5" SATA and up to 6x 2.5".

Post by Ray Van Dolson
Either because it carries the "ProLiant" brand or just... because --
parts for this thing are ridiculously expensive. My PSU failed and
it's over $200 to replace it. eBay prices aren't much better.

N54L costs 190 EUR sans rebates. At these price points they're
effectively disposable.

Post by Ray Van Dolson
I can hook up a standard ATX power supply of course, but obviously it
doesn't fit properly and I need to have the case wide open. Blech.

Seems like the job for pico-PSU. Would it at all
fit, does anyone know?

Post by Ray Van Dolson
So, I guess it would be a good option if you get the multi-year
warranty. :)

As a counter-anecdote, out of a population of some 10 units
24/7/365, not a single hardware failure, so far. Through the
grapevine, I'm also hearing the Microservers are reliable.

Post by Ray Van Dolson
My $0.02 anyway. Maybe things are different with the N40L.

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[David Yu]

Post by Eugen Leitl

Post by Ray Van Dolson
I have the N36L and it's a great little box, but I'd probably build
something or look elsewhere if I had it to do over.

I wouldn't. The N36L/N40L/N54L are really really cheap, considering
what you'd pay to build an ECC-capable low-power quiet NAS with
4-6x 3.5" SATA and up to 6x 2.5".

Post by Ray Van Dolson
Either because it carries the "ProLiant" brand or just... because --
parts for this thing are ridiculously expensive. My PSU failed and
it's over $200 to replace it. eBay prices aren't much better.

N54L costs 190 EUR sans rebates. At these price points they're
effectively disposable.

Post by Ray Van Dolson
I can hook up a standard ATX power supply of course, but obviously it
doesn't fit properly and I need to have the case wide open. Blech.

Seems like the job for pico-PSU. Would it at all
fit, does anyone know?

Post by Ray Van Dolson
So, I guess it would be a good option if you get the multi-year
warranty. :)

As a counter-anecdote, out of a population of some 10 units
24/7/365, not a single hardware failure, so far.

What type of workload does those servers get? Are they mainly NAS?

Post by Eugen Leitl
Through the
grapevine, I'm also hearing the Microservers are reliable.

Post by Ray Van Dolson
My $0.02 anyway. Maybe things are different with the N40L.

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[Erik Ableson]

Post by David Yu

Post by Eugen Leitl
As a counter-anecdote, out of a population of some 10 units
24/7/365, not a single hardware failure, so far.

What type of workload does those servers get? Are they mainly NAS?

I'm not sure I can characterize NAS as a workload :-), but I have a mix on my three servers:

- a couple of OS X user home directories published over NFS
- iTunes Library over NFS (music and video)
- iPhoto libraries over NFS
- Time machine volumes over AFP & iSCSI
- vSphere test bed including VMs running mail servers, syslog, some RoR instances, MS cluster testing, AD, etc., etc. over NFS & iSCSI

Very much storage servers, with little or nothing running on the host OS.

Cheers,

Erik


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[David Yu]

Post by Eugen Leitl
As a counter-anecdote, out of a population of some 10 units

Post by Eugen Leitl
24/7/365, not a single hardware failure, so far.

What type of workload does those servers get? Are they mainly NAS?
I'm not sure I can characterize NAS as a workload :-), but I have a mix
- a couple of OS X user home directories published over NFS
- iTunes Library over NFS (music and video)
- iPhoto libraries over NFS
- Time machine volumes over AFP & iSCSI
- vSphere test bed including VMs running mail servers, syslog, some RoR
instances, MS cluster testing, AD, etc., etc. over NFS & iSCSI
Very much storage servers, with little or nothing running on the host OS.

Cool. Thanks for sharing.

Post by Eugen Leitl
Cheers,
Erik
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[Eugen Leitl]

Post by David Yu

Post by Eugen Leitl
As a counter-anecdote, out of a population of some 10 units
24/7/365, not a single hardware failure, so far.

What type of workload does those servers get? Are they mainly NAS?

These are mostly zfs standalone NAS, but Linux and Windows 7
systems as well. The disks are not getting hammered, though
there's some NFS exports for VMWare ESXi which run production, and
write more or less constantly. The disks are nearline SATA,
1-3 TByte. For heavy I/O I'd put SSDs into it instead of 10-15
krpm SAS.



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[Erik ABLESON]

Post by j***@cos.ru
I think about building an illumos-based N40L (or similar home storage) which is quite popular in our ranks, for storage and virtualization and development hopefully. I expect to max out the ram with supported 8gb or allegedly working 16, and use 2.5" disk bays in place of the ODD bay.
My main question at the moment is - What did others do and reach, and was it on "home budget"?
Did anyone make use of 4tb hdds (and can raidz1 be reasonably used with 4 of those?), what hba's would be suggested for these and/or 2.5" disks (i thought of relatively small consumer ssd's for rpool/l2arc/zil, or possibly an rpool on extra couple of laptop hdd's); did anyone use remote console cards, or anything else weirdly interesting? :)

I have a number of the different generations running happily in different configurations. I currently have a N36, N40 & just purchased the N54. The key factor are price. The new N54L was on Amazon.fr for 200€. Frankly, I can't build a PC for that price with an equivalent configuration. You'll definitely want to tweak the BIOS in order to give a Solaris kernel based OS proper AHCI access to all of the available SATA ports.

My initial builds were using OpenSolaris, followed by Solaris 11 and now migrating to OmniOS. Currently three configurations, all with memory boosted to 8 Gb:

Media storage server : 4x2 Tb, RAIDZ booting from USB disk
Consolidation/backup server : 5x2Tb, RAIDZ, OmniOS on internal USB key
Lab Server (hosting VMs over NFS & iSCSI) : 4X1Tb 2.5", RAID1 + 256Gb L2ARC SSD, OmniOS on internal USB key

I've tested an Icybox 6 Drive 2.5" enclosure that goes in the 5.25" bay but since my machines are in living/working spaces I found that it made too much noise (and running internal cables & installing cards was a PITA). So currently I'm limiting my usage to the built-in drive connections.

For most regular media storage usage, random IOPS is not an issue, so going the RAIDZ route is just fine. I know some people that are running 3Tb drives so there should be no problem going up to 4Tb drives. That's my current expansion plan as I start filling up. I'll just replace the 2Tb drive with 3 or 4 Tb. Again, not gaining anything on the IOPS front, but that's not really the point for streaming movies and listening to music.

So budget wise, the box at 200€, 8 Gb RAM and 69€, and 5 4Tb Seagates 160€ (800€) a massive storage capacity for around 1000€. Or start with 5x1Tb currently running around 60€ (300€) for a total of around 570€ for 4tb of usable space.

My only complaints are that I would have liked to see USB 3 in the latest revision to speed up backups to external drives, but that's a minor inconvenience for the price.

I'm starting to look at the new G8 series of microservers, but for a basic storage box, the current ones are impossible to beat on price/performance/convenience/power draw comparison. The G8's are nice with higher max memory (officially supported to 16Gb) plus dual GbE but that's all overkill for basic storage usage. They're a nice option for running a hypervisor, but I've gone the Mac Mini route since they have pretty much the same basic performance profile, but the Mini's are so much smaller.

Cheers,

Erik

[Eugen Leitl]

Post by j***@cos.ru
Hello all,
I think about building an illumos-based N40L (or similar home storage) which is quite popular in our ranks, for storage and virtualization and development hopefully. I expect to max out the ram with supported 8gb or allegedly working 16, and use 2.5" disk bays in place of the ODD bay.

I've used N36L, N40L, N54L with 8 and 16 GByte ECC RAM. No Microserver G8 models yet.
Sometimes Intel NICs. SATA drives, some SSDs. No HBAs/SAS.
Environment is very cramped for HBAs. Not worth the price
premium for SAS either.

Post by j***@cos.ru
My main question at the moment is - What did others do and reach, and was it on "home budget"?
Did anyone make use of 4tb hdds (and can raidz1 be reasonably used with 4 of those?), what hba's would be suggested for these and/or 2.5" disks (i thought of relatively small consumer ssd's for rpool/l2arc/zil, or possibly an rpool on extra couple of laptop hdd's); did anyone use remote console cards, or anything else weirdly interesting? :)

AFAI only 3 TBytes are supported. Reliability-wise you shouldn't use
4 TBytes either, at current data density. I've used 3-6 2.5" SATA
bays in one 5.25" bay -- using SSDs and disabling the fans, as
these are noisy, and typically don't last long due to poor quality
and high rpm. Remote console yes, but HP ones are of terrible
quality -- don't rely on them to be responsive in a colo. Not
sure how reliable the HP G8 onboard IPMI is. Notice the G8
doesn't support VT-d/IOMMU either, so it's not that useful
for hardware passthrough/all-in-one scenarios. I might have
read something about using some cheap low-TDP Xeons in the
G8, but that might be confabulation, since these are probably
not socketed CPUs there.



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[Jim Klimov]

Post by Eugen Leitl
AFAI only 3 TBytes are supported. Reliability-wise you shouldn't use
4 TBytes either, at current data density. I've used 3-6 2.5" SATA

Thanks to everyone that replied, that's very appreciated :)
As for 4Tb drives - they are usable in other scenarios despite
the data density, aren't they? With an HP box limited to 4*3.5"
disks and a variable ODD-slot usage (maybe one more disk or SSDs)
there are not very many options if I want to go big right away
with a home NAS (around 10Tb)...

Now, for a second round of questions:

For those who boosted the RAM to 8/16Gb - where did you get it? :)
I gather that this uses a relatively low-spread memory technology,
and I had a link to a shop which is presumably an OEM supplier for
HP and Apple... did people find the chips in less obscure places?

Are there any particular HDD models in 3Tb/4Tb range to prefer or
avoid, from common theory or anecdotal experience (inside these
cramped boxes, preferably)? Anything about WD Red, Hitachi 7K4000?

Thanks again,
//Jim

[Darren Reed]

Post by Jim Klimov
...
For those who boosted the RAM to 8/16Gb - where did you get it? :)

I bought my N54L from a company that was supplying a 16GB
configuration as a "tested" and "functional" configuration. At
that point if I powered it on and it only saw 8GB and not 16GB,
it wasn't going to be my problem :) Was there any premium on
the price for that? Nope. I figure it is just someone doing their
due diligence on what they sell to reduce returns.

Cheers,
Darren

[James Dickens]

I have the N40L, great machine, maxed out at 8GB of memory, no issues,
uptimes are too good, had patched my Openinidana but didn't have a need to
reboot it for over 500 days finally did reboot it. currently have 250 GB
for OS, and 2x 3TB for data storage, will be adding 1 single 3TB drive for
scratch pool,nothing important but want more space to toss stuff in
temporarily... Love the build quality, and the 53 watts of power usage
currently plugged into a 1 kva ups and 104 minutes of run time when the
power off. ToDo: is to install a dual gigabit card for jumbo MTU's that
should help for cpu usage, I see 60-80MB/s over CIFS and NFS.

Post by j***@cos.ru
Hello all,
I think about building an illumos-based N40L (or similar home storage)
which is quite popular in our ranks, for storage and virtualization and
development hopefully. I expect to max out the ram with supported 8gb or
allegedly working 16, and use 2.5" disk bays in place of the ODD bay.
My main question at the moment is - What did others do and reach, and was
it on "home budget"?
Did anyone make use of 4tb hdds (and can raidz1 be reasonably used with 4
of those?), what hba's would be suggested for these and/or 2.5" disks (i
thought of relatively small consumer ssd's for rpool/l2arc/zil, or possibly
an rpool on extra couple of laptop hdd's); did anyone use remote console
cards, or anything else weirdly interesting? :)
Thanks,
//Jim Klimov
Typos courtesy of my Samsung Mobile
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[Stephan Budach]

Post by James Dickens
I have the N40L, great machine, maxed out at 8GB of memory, no issues,
uptimes are too good, had patched my Openinidana but didn't have a
need to reboot it for over 500 days finally did reboot it. currently
have 250 GB for OS, and 2x 3TB for data storage, will be adding 1
single 3TB drive for scratch pool,nothing important but want more
space to toss stuff in temporarily... Love the build quality, and the
53 watts of power usage currently plugged into a 1 kva ups and 104
minutes of run time when the power off. ToDo: is to install a dual
gigabit card for jumbo MTU's that should help for cpu usage, I see
60-80MB/s over CIFS and NFS.

I have maxed out the RAM of my N40L with 16GB and have been happy with
it ever since. I am using it as iSCSI storage for my Xsan at home, plus
some virtualization using VirtualBox, which serves a Zimbra VM along
with some Timemachine backup for my Macs at home.

Current uptime is 318 days, btw.

Post by James Dickens
Hello all,
I think about building an illumos-based N40L (or similar home
storage) which is quite popular in our ranks, for storage and
virtualization and development hopefully. I expect to max out the
ram with supported 8gb or allegedly working 16, and use 2.5" disk
bays in place of the ODD bay.
My main question at the moment is - What did others do and reach,
and was it on "home budget"?
Did anyone make use of 4tb hdds (and can raidz1 be reasonably used
with 4 of those?), what hba's would be suggested for these and/or
2.5" disks (i thought of relatively small consumer ssd's for
rpool/l2arc/zil, or possibly an rpool on extra couple of laptop
hdd's); did anyone use remote console cards, or anything else
weirdly interesting? :)
Thanks,
//Jim Klimov
Typos courtesy of my Samsung Mobile
**

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[David Yu]

Post by James Dickens
I have the N40L, great machine, maxed out at 8GB of memory, no issues,
uptimes are too good, had patched my Openinidana but didn't have a need to
reboot it for over 500 days finally did reboot it. currently have 250 GB
for OS, and 2x 3TB for data storage, will be adding 1 single 3TB drive for
scratch pool,nothing important but want more space to toss stuff in
temporarily... Love the build quality, and the 53 watts of power usage
currently plugged into a 1 kva ups and 104 minutes of run time when the
power off. ToDo: is to install a dual gigabit card for jumbo MTU's that
should help for cpu usage, I see 60-80MB/s over CIFS and NFS.
I have maxed out the RAM of my N40L with 16GB and have been happy with it
ever since

May I ask the brand of ecc ram you're using? All my n40l's only have 8gb
(kingston ecc) installed.
Are you using the default bios firmware?

Thanks

Post by James Dickens
. I am using it as iSCSI storage for my Xsan at home, plus some
virtualization using VirtualBox, which serves a Zimbra VM along with some
Timemachine backup for my Macs at home.
Current uptime is 318 days, btw.

Post by j***@cos.ru
Hello all,
I think about building an illumos-based N40L (or similar home storage)
which is quite popular in our ranks, for storage and virtualization and
development hopefully. I expect to max out the ram with supported 8gb or
allegedly working 16, and use 2.5" disk bays in place of the ODD bay.
My main question at the moment is - What did others do and reach, and was
it on "home budget"?
Did anyone make use of 4tb hdds (and can raidz1 be reasonably used with 4
of those?), what hba's would be suggested for these and/or 2.5" disks (i
thought of relatively small consumer ssd's for rpool/l2arc/zil, or possibly
an rpool on extra couple of laptop hdd's); did anyone use remote console
cards, or anything else weirdly interesting? :)
Thanks,
//Jim Klimov
Typos courtesy of my Samsung Mobile
**

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[Stephan Budach]

Post by Stephan Budach

Post by James Dickens
I have the N40L, great machine, maxed out at 8GB of memory, no
issues, uptimes are too good, had patched my Openinidana but
didn't have a need to reboot it for over 500 days finally did
reboot it. currently have 250 GB for OS, and 2x 3TB for data
storage, will be adding 1 single 3TB drive for scratch
pool,nothing important but want more space to toss stuff in
temporarily... Love the build quality, and the 53 watts of power
usage currently plugged into a 1 kva ups and 104 minutes of run
time when the power off. ToDo: is to install a dual gigabit card
for jumbo MTU's that should help for cpu usage, I see 60-80MB/s
over CIFS and NFS.

I have maxed out the RAM of my N40L with 16GB and have been happy
with it ever since
May I ask the brand of ecc ram you're using? All my n40l's only have
8gb (kingston ecc) installed.
Are you using the default bios firmware?

Well, I will have to look that up, but afair the main gotcha was the
memory layout and I think it was 8x1024k, which made the N40L accept the
8 GB memory bars
 As far as the BIOS goes, I have a modded one installed
- not for the memory, but for the AHCI feature.

I will look up the memory type, but afair it was a rather generic CSX one.





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[Jim Klimov]

FWIW, during this round of evaluating my options I found this fine
Wiki about the N40L and related family of storage servers (5 models
across Gen7 and Gen8).

One of great features there is a HCL listing with the specific part
numbers of memory chips (including several Kingston 2*8Gb ECC sets),
HDDs (including some 4TB models), etc. of items tried out by users.
Also there are links to BIOS modding, and some other procedures.

http://n40l.wikia.com/wiki/Base_Hardware_N54L

I wonder if this should be linked to from the illumos/OI websites,
perhaps from the HCL pages (as it is a popular platform after all)?

HTH,
//Jim Klimov

[Jim Klimov]

Post by j***@cos.ru
Hello all,
I think about building an illumos-based N40L (or similar home storage)
which is quite popular in our ranks, for storage and virtualization and
development hopefully. I expect to max out the ram with supported 8gb or
allegedly working 16, and use 2.5" disk bays in place of the ODD bay.
My main question at the moment is - What did others do and reach, and
was it on "home budget"?
Did anyone make use of 4tb hdds (and can raidz1 be reasonably used with
4 of those?), what hba's would be suggested for these and/or 2.5" disks
(i thought of relatively small consumer ssd's for rpool/l2arc/zil, or
possibly an rpool on extra couple of laptop hdd's); did anyone use
remote console cards, or anything else weirdly interesting? :)

Hello all, again :)
I figured out most of the components for an N54L-based rig, except
for a storage controller to drive the 2.5" bays (with the SSDs, in
particular, so HBA's speed is of essence). So far I've looked at a
SuperMicro AOC-USAS2-L8E as a cheap LSI2008-based 8-port card with
IT mode out of the box, but it happens to be full-height and does
not fit into the N54L chassis.

What other, similarly inexpensive (circa $100, not $300+) cards can
the esteemed list members suggest? Primary parameters:
* PCI-E, half-length, low-profile, 4-8 internal ports (SFF-8087 okay)
* 6Gbit/s preferred, good random IOPS performance
* SATA support a must, SAS irrelevant
* reliable hardware and firmware; IT mode desired, HWRAID irrelevant
* bootable BIOS
* illumos/Solaris drivers available, preferably included in the gate
(and on installation Live media)

Also, so far my plan was to drive both the data drives (4*4Tb) and
the system/cache SSDs (in a 4*2.5" bay) with the 8-port card, which
made the motherboard's controller irrelevant. Now that I might be
limited to 4-port HBA's, and might have to use the motherboard HBA
as well, I'd like to ask the people's general experience with it -
is it reliable, fast (i.e. good for SSDs or not), does it have any
problems with drives over 2TB (4TB are of interest at the moment)?

Finally, nearly everyone in the internet uses a hacked BIOS which
unlocks some features (such as the use of ODD SATA port for general
SATA devices). Is there one list of benefits that the hacked BIOS
provides, so one can glance and decide whether to bother? :)

Thanks again,
//Jim Klimov

[Jim Klimov]

Post by Jim Klimov
Finally, nearly everyone in the internet uses a hacked BIOS which
unlocks some features (such as the use of ODD SATA port for general
SATA devices). Is there one list of benefits that the hacked BIOS
provides, so one can glance and decide whether to bother? :)

And also, does anyone on-list use the N54L with a modified BIOS?
Namely, can the popular BIOSes for N40L be used on N54L as well,
or are the components too different in some way? :)

[Erik Ableson]

Post by Jim Klimov
And also, does anyone on-list use the N54L with a modified BIOS?
Namely, can the popular BIOSes for N40L be used on N54L as well,
or are the components too different in some way? :)

I have an N36, an N40 and just bought the N54, all running the same release of the hacked BIOS.

Wouldn't go back to stock since Solaris & OmniOS won't access the esata port or the sata port going to the DVD bay.

Erik