Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog

The DL320 is HP’s low end rackserver, similar to IBM’s System x3250, which i reviewed earlier.

This machine was purchased for use in a colocation center as a general web and mailserver for non-profit purposes, using Debian GNU/Linux 4.0. As such, there were serious budget constraints involved, which is why the machine chosen is on the lowest end of available (rack) hardware - as such, the machine doesn’t have a diagnostic panel (like HP’s DL360 G5 do, or IBM’s x3550 or x3650).

The machine was ordered using the new ALSO IVIS HP TopConfig configurator, and as such was shipped assembled (the delivery time was 9 days). Most in-stock articles have builtin CD or Diskette drives, which are a factor in price. With configured machines, you can save a few bucks with these things, and also get a better memory configuration (this is very important in low end machines, because they usually only have 4 memory slots (compared to 8 or 12 that better machines have)).

Here’s the configuration:

• HP DL320 G5 with 2.13 Ghz Xeon DC CPU
• 2×1 GB Memory
• 2×160GB 7.2kRPM SATA Disks

Unpacking and opening

This machine ships with the usual features known from HP - iLO 2, but without any licenses for advanced use (you can use it with a serial console that can be accessed with a Java Client). Also the slide-out serial number tag (an awesome idea in my opinion).

The machine also shipped prebuilt (which is nice, as i’m probably the most lazy person on earth) - the hard disk in the machine look like they’re hot -pluggable, and they theoretically are - but the onboard SATA controller does not support hot plugging. If you want that, you’ll need to buy a RAID controller from HP. I like this setup a bit more than IBM’s Simple Swap harddisks, but there’s no real advantage in daily use.

The components where assembled nicely, and the build quality is generally good.

Interiors

The general interior of this machine is very much the same as the x3250 - with a rather interesting difference: the machine has built in USB port, with lot’s of free space around it. I really have no idea what you’d want to do with this (if it was a desktop machine, you could probably use it with Flash for Vista’s ReadyBoost technology).

The fans in the machine are not hot pluggable, but redundant. The cabling is en par with the x3250, but there’s a slight disadvantage in extensibility. While the x3250 has a separate slot for installing specific IBM RAID controllers, there’s no such thing in the HP machine - you’ll have to use one of the PCI-E 8x slots for installing one of the HP RAID controllers. I do not consider this to be a problem in daily use either, because there’s usually not much need for expansion adapters in 1U machines.

Booting the server

The onboard controller is a standard Intel AHCI SATA controller (You will need to enable RAID functionality in the BIOS, and leave the RAID BIOS unconfigured - this will expose both disks to Linux using the AHCI driver). As of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, this controller is now natively supported in the default configuration. There are many options in the BIOS to save a variety of contact information. Maybe useful in enterprise environments, didn’t play with them that much.

iLO configuration works fine as usual, but netbooting the machine was awkward - it refused to load our WDS bootloader several times, but succeeded finally (WDS then boots RIS, which then boots PXELinux - here’s how to do this). I have no idea if it is just an old switch acting up, or an actual problem.

Resumee

Is this machine better than the x3250? Make up your own opinion. The only real world advantage i’ve seen is that iLO 2 is included in the machine, and allows you to access a serial console for free. The iLO advanced option which allows KVM access (and a variety of enterprise integration features) is quite expensive at about 450 CHF. The x3250 does not ship with an RSA II, but the RSA II is only 250 CHF, a lot less than the KVM access license.

When you’re using Windows, you can use EMS to use the serial port, on Linux or other Unix based OSes you can usually redirect both the console and the kernel to a serial port (and of course you can redirect the BIOS).

I liked the disks, which seem to handle much more nicely than the Simple Swap SATA disks from IBM.