[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI on HP ProLiant Microserver Gen8

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-07-11 17:53, Bryan N Iotti wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I was wondering if any of you have had the opportunity to test whether
> OI works on the new HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8...

Until your mail I did not know they existed, I thought (and was sad)
that HP got stuck at the venerable N40L. Following the links from
pages on Gen8 (alas, specs are too vague to speculate about driver
compatibility), I found that there is also a Gen7 - HP N54L which
was apparently released around the last New Year. On the first
glance at the picture and specs I can't find differences from N40L
(and in some pages it is also referenced as a Gen7), but possibly
there is a different number of PCIe slots (3 vs. 2) and a newer CPU.
* 
http://www.wegotserved.com/2012/12/07/hp-proliant-microserver-n54l-full-specs/
* 
http://shopping1.hp.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/WW-USSMBPublicStore-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewProductDetail-Start?ProductUUID=n7IQ7EN5vrIAAAE6jsBsy1QS&CatalogCategoryID=H20Q7EN5z88AAAEuEQIsTi_9

 From the looks of it - I wouldn't shop for Gen8 (maybe someone can
disprove me - my overview is cursory at the moment).

On one hand, the Gen8 possibly has some faster SATA connectivity
and a fine bonus of iLO built in, but only one PCIe expansion slot.
While Gen8 supports 16Gb officially; some list members reported
(after my nagging) that some had success with 2*8Gb on N40L as well.
They all come with 2-4Gb by default, so you'd likely have to upgrade
(unless you can force HP to pre-build a larger-RAM machine for you).
So there's little difference here. I am a bit surprised to see
a Celeron allegedly supporting ECC, oh well :)

Also, the Gen8 is a slimmer model - without a 5.25 bay like on the
two older models which you could use for 4 or 6 (slim) 2.5" disks
for laptop or SSD drives - for rpool, cache, etc.

I am not sure how many USB ports are on Gen8 (at least two on front,
maybe some on iLO as well?), and more importantly whether they are
USB3 (unsupported in illumos); the N40L and N54L have 7*USB2 ports.

I'd say, of these three the N54L currently seems like a winner for
illumos-based small NASes, especially if expandable to larger RAM.
The PCI slots are never enough, and now you can house a both storage
controller (for added HDD/SSD dock and/or for eSATA and JBOD towers),
and you could also shop for remote management cards which would be
your IPMI, kbd/video/mouse redirectors, and maybe even an external
reset option (some have cables to plug into MB reset/power pins).
They often cost an unholy (for a home-user) amount, however, but
still are an option... Heck, maybe one could make something like
this of a Raspberry Pi now (or did already?) ;)

Also, if intended for home use with a media-center inclination,
and if OI performance with graphics would be deemed acceptable for
that, you might want to plug in an (NVidia) video card...

My 2c,
//Jim Klimov