Friday, March 25, 2011

EON ZFS Storage on a HP Proliant MicroServer

I received the following pictures from a EON ZFS storage user, Nasir (thanks), confirming EON running fine on the HP Proliant Microserver. A few people have made inquiries about EON and compatibility with this hardware so this may help with your build plans. Again, I don't own the hardware so I have not thoroughly tested it but seems the network interface, zpool members and number of CPU cores register correctly. The HP Proliant MicroServer (more details) is a mini-itx form factor and supports up to 8GB of ECC RAM. Go ahead, store it your way ...
Broadcom nics work
EON on HP MicroServer


1.3Ghz x 2 cores online
zpool + disk members

12 comments:

Cedric Tineo said...

Good news!

Anyone know of similar products (4-5 bays) from other manufacturers - or good cases with hotswap drives for building home-servers?

ìgbàlonígbàńlò said...

i have a problem. I rebooted the server and eon is not mounted not matter what I do. have you come across this before? Thanks

ìgbàlonígbàńlò said...

I meant to say that the eon folder is not mounted at all.

ìgbàlonígbàńlò said...

Never mind. The filesystem on the usb got corrupted, how I don't know. I had to find an opensolaris system to use to fix it. Fsck fixed it, it seems.

Andre Lue said...

Hi igbalonigbanlo,

Whenever the /mnt/eon0 folder does not mount, the first step is to try and fsck the EON usb drive.

You could use EON to fsck itself when it does not mount or you can boot from the EON install cd and fsck the usb drive from there.

Hi Cedric,

A popular case that supports hot swap is the Chenbro ES34069-BK-180. The 180 means it comes with a 180watt power brick, 120 is a 120watt supply etc.

Business logo design said...

Your post have the information that is helpful and very informative. I would like you to keep up the good work.

Eric_DL said...

I too am in the process of installing EON on this great piece of hardware.
Well actually install and boot went perfectly smoothly, the only problem that I've faced so far is that EON fails to physically stop the machine at the end of an "init 0" procedure, but I've not yet investigated on that.

For the moment, I'm carefully gathering information to choose the zpool scheme that best fits my needs.

I plan to add later this convenient small Raidon rack (http://www.raidon.com.tw/content.php?sno=0000462&p_id=124) inside the front 5.25" bay to upgrade my pool with a mirror of 2.5" SSDs for ZIL/cache.

Thanks so much Andre for such a good job with EON.

Andre Lue said...

Eric_DL,

When you state, "init 0" fails to stop, do you mean power off the unit? If so you are looking for "init 5". If not, please add more details.

The build sounds interesting, feel free to send/share a write-up of your build when it's all complete.

Eric_DL said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Eric_DL said...

Update and question

Hi Andre,

You're right "init 5" to turn off hardware after OS stop, not "init 0" .... Linux reflex :-)

My hardware configuration is almost complete (https://plus.google.com/photos/101911580744846511534/albums/5694715979951943361?authkey=CPbHwdDv8pyKnAE) ... RAID 1 rack is in place but not powered on yet because it lacks the 2.5" SSDs.

I've spent much time searching what kind of SSD best suits the constant sequential writes that ZIL induces and there seems no way out of a server-grade SSD (SLC-type) to get something really dependable with a decent lifetime.
I was looking through some server-grade SSDs (whose prices are just insanely high btw) when Intel released the 311 series 20GB SLC SSDs for their "Smart Response" platform.
Of course they made some trade-offs for these SSDs to have a decent price. The most annoying one being they cut down the power-loss data protection.

So now I have to find a perfectly stable UPS for my ZIL not to get lost or corrupted. After all, you can't seriously build a server and not back it up with an UPS right !

OK, I'll end here with my question : how do I set the amount of idle time until EON spins down the disks ?

Maybe I've missed something but I was unable to find the answer anywhere.

Happy new year and congratulations for the first OI release.

Andre Lue said...

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the photo. Nice looking setup you have going there. Are those the 2 x SSD's at the top? It would be nice to hear more about the intel 311 SSDs performance as ZILs. Feel free to share your build spec/write-up as other users may find it beneficial.

Spin down time is set in /etc/power.conf via a combination of autopm (already set) and the addition of your /device entries and threshold time.
autopm enable

device-thresholds /device threshold_time
device-thresholds /dev/dsk/c1d0 15m

Unknown said...

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