Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog

HP recently had a special offering for an ML110 G5 hardware bundle, that consisted of the following parts:

• Intel Xeon 3065 2.33Ghz 4MB L2
• 512MB ECC RAM
• E200 SAS Controller (8 Ports, 128MB BBWC)
• 2x 160GB 7.2kRPM SATA Disks

For less than 400 CHF. As i needed a machine to run SBS2008 at home, and my current one wasn’t 64bit capable, this seemed like a good buy, especially because the E200 with BBWC alone is worth around 300 CHF.

Of course, i needed more RAM and disk space. I also ordered 4x 2GB memory modules (with ECC) from a third party memory manufacturer (Transcend) - priced at around 80 CHF each. I also ordered 4x Western Digital 1TB disks that are optimized for 24 hour use, priced at around 180 CHF.

This brought me to a total price of around 1500 CHF. I had two 160GB disks that i didn’t have any use for (except throwing them at people i don’t like).

1500 CHF is a lot of money for me, but for a company it’s nothing - still, this is ideal for experimentation. The free ESXi supports the E200 SAS controller, making it easy to build a test lab based on VMware - also, Windows Server 2008 x64 and Hyper-V also run flawlessly on the machine.

The machine is also very quiet, making it possible to use it in a normal appartment or in your office.

You get what you pay for still applies - the machine has no remote management features, only a single network port, forcing you to use the same port for management and virtual machine traffic, which can be acceptable in a test environment. HP’s System Insight Manager is not supported on this machine, either.

The case is very small, resembling a normal HP client minitower. The mainboard supports ECC memory, which is becoming more and more important with todays memory sizes. Unfortunately, it only offers four memory slots with a maximum capacity of 2GB per stick, maxing the machine out at only 8GB of RAM.

The integrated E200 SAS RAID Controller has a 128MB BBWC card, that allows it to use it as a write cache, and enables licensing to use RAID5. In my case, i used RAID10. The disk performance is better than anticipated, even though i’m using slow consumer drives, the performance for running VMs is acceptable.

The machine has three x8 PCI-E slots and a single PCI slot. One of the x8 slots is used by the E200 controller.

This offer is still available under HP Part# 470064-639, and there are still some companies that are selling it for the lower promotion price.

I’m currently running SBS2008 directly on the hardware, with not virtualization in-between. The performance is good, but i’d still never use such a setup for a production deployment at a customer - the management options, hardware flexibility, redundancy etc. just aren’t fit for production.

Update: I was asked about Linux compatibility on this machine. See the official HP Linux compatibility list. The E200 SAS RAID Controller is supported by the cciss driver, which is in the vanilla linux kernel. So most distributions will be able to install on this box - support is another matter, though.

There is no easy way to get official support for non-corporate versions of Linux, like Ubuntu. My usual way in those scenarios is to run Linux as a VM under ESXi, but that doesn’t work with the ML110 as ESXi is not supported (but works).