[OmniOS-discuss] HP Z230 as a home server

[R. Matthew Emerson]

On Oct 21, 2014, at 4:24 PM, Dan McDonald <danmcd at omniti.com> wrote:

> 
>> On Oct 21, 2014, at 3:25 PM, Dominik Hassler <hasslerd at gmx.li> wrote:
> 
> <SNIP!>
> 
>> of course i'd like to have an omnios server at home, too. nothing fancy,
>> basically just for data storage (nfs and smb sharing) and 1-2 linux kvms
>> for multimedia services and auxiliary stuff. since i don't have a
>> dedicated room where noise does not matter i have to consider quiet
>> "workstation hardware" instead of noisy "server hardware".
>> 
>> here is the hardware setup i am planning to go with:
>> - HP Z230 (WM583EA#UUZ) which is basically
> 
> http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/workstations/z230.html
> 
> Interesting.  It's a socket 1150 workstation.  Good for illumos.
> 
>> -> Intel PCH C226 chipset
>> -> E3-1225v3 quad core XEON
> 
> Gotta get that ECC support.  Also, while not HT, it does have good clock speed (> 3GHz).
> 
>> -> Intel I217LM PCIe Gigabit-Controller
> 
> Supported, and relatively new.  Should show up as e1000g.  I notice you can get a 2nd ethernet with an I210. This would show up as igb.
> 
>> - 4x 8 GB ECC RAM (HP A2Z50AA)
> 
> Gotta do ECC!
> 
>> - 1x 1 TB WD Re, S-ATA III (512n) as rpool
>> - 2x 4 TB WD Re, S-ATA III (512n) as a data mirror
> 
> I might swap in an SSD for rpool, but that's just me.  (NOTE:  If you do use an SSD, don't use it for swap, though with 32GB, you won't need swap at all).  And for your data, it doesn't matter (I don't think) if it's 512 or 4k sectors, just so long as you know what it is up front, they MATCH, and set things appropriately when creating the pool.
> 
> If others here have opinions, you ought to share 'em.  I'm running a Supermicro not unlike what the HP offers:
> 
> 	http://kebesays.blogspot.com/2014/06/home-data-center-20-dogfooding-again.html
> 
> I got more NICs though.  :)


My small home server is a Supermicro X10SLM-F-O with a Xeon 1230v3 in a Supermicro CSE-731i-300B case.  The board is nice because it has two NICs (one e1000g, one igb), and also a dedicated one for IPMI.  I used memory from Crucial (CT2KIT102472BD160B) and a pair of Toshiba 2 TB disks (PH3200U-1I72) as my data pool (on sale at the local Micro Center).  I'm using a 500GB Hitachi disk that I happened to have around for my rpool.

This ended up being around $900, which I thought was way cheap.

If I did it again, I might consider the larger 732 series case, which is supposed to be a little bit quieter.  My desktop box is a pretty quiet 27" iMac, and I can hear the Supermicro box's fans from about 5 feet away.  The noise not really objectionable, but it's not silent either.

The only problem I had with this hardware was that fastboot would hang, but the suggestion in http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.omnios.general/1043 solved that.

I would have gone with a factory-built box, but Dell wasn't selling Haswell Xeon E3 systems at the time, and HP was trying hard to discourage customers from using non-HP disks.