Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog

I’ve written a bit about ESXi before in a comparison to other free virtualization products from an SMB perspective.

I’ve seen the “big” ESX in a few places and worked a bit with it, but i decided to refresh my knowledge on VMware a bit. For this, i first had to scrounge up a machine that was able to pass the rigorous HCL from VMware.

Unfortunately i didn’t find something that was really a Small Business machine - i used a HS21 Blade from my BladeCenter S testing environment.

The HS21 blade has 4GB RAM, a 2.66 Ghz QuadCore CPU and two 500GB SATA Harddisks attached to an LSI1064 SAS Controller. Fortunately, this configuration is supported.

Installing ESXi

Similar to the installation of Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista, the ESXi installation is extremely streamlined. All you have to do is pop the CD in, select the disk where you want to install ESXi and then let it continue. The whole setup took around 15 minutes, most of the delay owed to the extremely slow Laptop CD Drive installed in the BladeCenter S.

After installation, the Blade rebooted and you will be greeted by an extremely simplistic interface that allows you to change basics like the password of ESXi and reconfigure the management network interface and also display a few logfiles. On first startup, it also showed my a Web address where i can download the VI Client that is used to manage ESXi.

A very pleasant experience.

Installing the VI Client

After accessing the ESXi host through HTTP, i could then download the VI Client. Installation on another Blade running WS2008 was smooth. It also installed an Update Service that allows me to upgrade ESXi.

Configuring ESXi for the first time

After logging on using the VI Client to ESXi, i was greeted with a nicely detailed instructions that i would need to create a datastore. After few clicks i had a datastore created on the RAID1 that ESXi was installed.

The VI Client looks very impressive and neat. It looks like ESXi can read diagnostic information from the Blade, and can monitor RAID, Fan and other stati easily. One of the things i really like about this is that you get a standardized interface for monitoring your hardware - on Windows you usually have to use tools like IBM Director that are just one big mess to handle. Here, i didn’t have to configure anything - it just worked.

After entering licensing information, configurating a static IP Address, changing hostname and DNS information, i rebooted the blade.

Creating the first Virtual Machine

I decided to create a first virtual machine - the blade i killed for running ESXi was previously running Exchange 2007. As this is just a demonstration setup, i decided to recover the preexisting Exchange server into a VM, in order continue having a full featured demo setup.

So i created a new Virtual Machine, configured for running Windows Server 2008 x64. Now, i didn’t have WDS setup in the Demo Environment, so i had to find a way to boot the Blade from an ISO. Previously i used scp to copy the ISO to the ESX Management Partition, but that didn’t work on ESXi. Luckily, the VI Client has a “Datastore Browser” that allowed me to upload files to the vmfs3 filesystem.

After uploading the ISO, i booted from it. The installation was pretty slow, but comparisons to my Hyper-V hosts aren’t fair as those run 10kRPM 147GB SAS Disks in a RAID5 configuration instead of the slow-as-molasses 500GB 7.2kRPM SATA Disks.

After OS installation, i immediately installed the VMware tools. One reboot later, i had a working Windows Server 2008 machine.

One of the things i noticed: When running WS08 virtualized on Hyper-V with 4 virtual CPUs on a Quadcore machine, WS08 thinks i have on Quadcore. On VMware, WS08 thinks i have 4 real CPUs (Sockets). This can bite you if you want to give a WS08 Std Machine more than 4 Cores - as WS08 Std is only licensed to four sockets.

The next step obviously is restoring the Exchange server, but that doesn’t really have to do all that much with ESXi.

Conclusion

ESXi is great. One of the biggest advantages over Hyper-V is the VI Client that consolidates a lot of information that is all strewn about in Windows. For example, it has built-in performance metrics, raid status monitors, etc. You can get all the same information with a machine running Hyper-V, but you’ll have to use other tools for that (of course you can customize a MMC do include Perfmon, but it’s not exactly the same).

VMware shows that they have gained long term experience with Virtual Machines, and the VI Client clearly shows the maturity of their product.

Permission management seems much better than Hyper-V, but i didn’t find a way to use Active Directory integration. Maybe Virtual Center is required to this, or i just wasn’t able to find it in ESXi - it exists, because there are numerous references on the Web.

I’ll certainly consider using Hyper-V when i have to run non-Windows guests. For Windows guests, Hyper-V with it’s VMbus architecture seems better suited. For non-Windows guests, VMware can’t be beaten right now.

Last Friday i received a new toy. An IBM BladeCenter S, with two HS21, one HS21 XM and a JS12 Blade.

The BladeCenter S

The BladeCenter S i received came with 10 500GB SATA Disks and two DSMs, four power supplies, an Advanced Management Module, a Server Connectivity Module and a SAS Connectivity Module. The power supplies use standard 230V type 23 plugs, which do require a little special installation, but much less so than industrial plugs used with the bigger BladeCenters.

The big point about the BladeCenter S is that it does not require an external SAN to provide Storage to the Blade - an integrated SAS Switch that allows very flexible disk configurations is integrated. Configuration can be done using a Webbrowser against the SAS Connectivity Web Interface, using SSH/Telnet to access the SAS Connectivity Commandline, or using a fully graphical interface using IBM’s Storage Configuration Manager. There are some predefined configurations, but none of them suited my configuration - creating new configurations using SCM is easy enough though.

The disks in the BladeCenter’s DSMs (Disk Storage Module) are hot swappable - currently, only 3.5″ DSMs are available, with a 2.5″ DSM in the pipeline. Most of the blades support one or two internal disks, but the problem here is that these disks are not hot swappable. Depending on your Blade loadout, 12 disks might not be enough. For example, the HS21 XM Blades only fit one internal disk, and running without RAID on the System partition seems pointless, so you would be using at least 6 disks (without hotspares) for a basic Exchange deployment.

The Webinterface on the AMM is nicely done, although it lacks a bit of flashiness. That’s not a requirement though, it does a very solid job at what it needs to do.

After powering up the BladeCenter S for the first time, i connected to it using a web browser and upgraded all the firmwares. There are quite a lot of them (AMM, SAS, Server Connectivity), but it all worked out flawlessly. Time to move on to the real course: the Blades.

The HS21 and the HS21 XM

Starting with the familiar first, i started with the HS21 Intel Blades first. The two HS21 Blades both had a 2.66 Ghz Quadcore and 4GB RAM, the HS21 XM Blade had a 2.5 Ghz Quadcore and 9GB of RAM (more about that later).

When starting the first HS21 Blade, after configuring all the storage using SCM, it failed to POST it’s LSI Logic SAS/RAID Controller. I searched for the error message on the net, assuming that i screwed up the configuration. I didn’t find anything meaningful, so i tried to do what everyone else would do in this situation: Apply every Firmware update for the Blade i could find.

Of course it wasn’t as easy as i wanted it to be. The controller not POSTing was an endless loop, i couldn’t get the machine to start from the AMM virtual floppy drive. I used SCM to disconnect the storage (by disabling the Blade’s SAS port). Now, the blade booted flawlessly, indicating that i probably had a problem with my disks. When browsing the IBM website, it became obvious that only newer firmwares support SATA drives. After upgrading the SAS Firmware, i was able to boot the blade without disabling the Blade’s SAS port. Unfortunately, the onboard SAS controller only supports RAID level 1 and 10. Probably owed to the fact that most blades are using SAN storage - IBM promised that there would be SAS RAID adapter that supports other RAID levels - these are especially important for the cost-conscious SMB market.

I booted a Windows PE 2.0 using WDS, and was able to install Windows Server 2008 x64 without any issues.

The HS21 XM blade on the other hand complained when booted for the first time that it’s memory configuration was invalid - it only supports 2, 4 and 8 DIMM configurations - 6 DIMM configurations are not supported. I removed two 512MB modules and booted the Blade with 8GB - it worked flawlessly and without complaining.

The JS12

First, read this document about i on Blade. It explains everything better than i ever could.

The JS12 is a POWER6 based blade that is able to run IBM i. The first time i turned on the blade, all the HS21 blades (already running Windows Server 2008) crashed hard. When rebooting, they no longer found their drives. I turned off all the blades, disconnected the JS12’s SAS port and turned everything on again. The Intel blades booted, and after i was sure that they’re up and running again, i powered on the JS12 again. This time, no issue arised. I tried to reproduce the behaviour i’ve seen before, and the same thing happened again.

My current assumption is that the issues were caused by the SAS Controller which does not have a Firmware update yet, and can’t deal with the SATA drives located in the DSMs. Further investigation told me that there’s no firmware upgrade for the SAS Controller in the POWER6 blade, and that SATA drives are not supported when running IBM i on the blade anyway. I ordered 4 147GB SAS drives, disabled the SAS port on the blade, and tried booting the POWER6 blade again. It booted flawlessly again.

The next step was to install VIOS - this is a rather complicated multi-step process. First, you have to turn on “Serial over LAN” aka SOL, then logon to the AMM using SSH, connect to the POWER blade using serial passthrough and then boot the blade from the VIOS CD. The install is pretty self explanatory, but takes forever. Expect 3 to 4 hours.

Next is connecting to the Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM) running on the VIOS partition. The IVM is basically a HMC light minus the console functionality. The only way to get a console on the JS12 blade is using a LAN console (which can only run on consumer versions of Windows, and is not supported on most of the Blades).

I installed the latest VIOS patches (around 4GB) and enabled mirroring on the two 147GB SAS disks in the blade itself. The next step will be installing IBM i, with which i have to wait until i receive the ordered SAS Disks. Installing the patches also takes quite some time, around 30 minutes.

Preliminary Summary

The BladeCenter S is great. Yep, not everything ran flawlessly from the start, but nobody’s perfect from the beginning. The BladeCenter brings an innovative new perspective to the SMB market. The problems that IBM needs to address are the addition of 2.5″ DSMs (already in the works) and more capable RAID controllers (also in the works). A BladeCenter S with the ability to use around 20-40 disks could prove interesting.

The POWER6 Blade is interesting, and while VIOS adds complexity, it is as streamlined as possible. I’m interested about seeing IBM i running on the machine.

If you have any other question about the BladeCenter S - or anything you would like to see in detail, post a comment. I’ll try to figure it out.

Currently, i’m still waiting for my copy of 5722-QU2, aka Web Query. We’ve ordered it over a month ago, and have received the keys in the meanwhile, but no media. While IBM does theoretically offer media download, it does not do so for 5722-QU2 (Wondering where you can download i5/OS media? IBM ESS).

The fact that i haven’t got any interesting project running right now, and IBM isn’t shipping me new toys i just decided to complain about delivery times. This might not actually be interesting.

When it comes to delivery times, my experience with IBM has always been abysmal. The local swiss distributors (Avnet, TechData, Also) are usually low on stock, don’t have any System i stock (automatically giving you 2-8 weeks, depending on IBM’s mood). Software orders also take ages, especially additional software on new Systems (we usually buy 5722-IP1 for our customers to generate PDF). These software orders usually take 2+ weeks after the system was shipped.

Even System x servers are rather hard to come by. While there are usually a few (less than 5) models on stock, additional parts (like disks, memory) are sometimes out of stock too. Out of stock articles usually take up to three weeks.

The situation is even worse with IBM printers - no stock anywhere, and delivery times are 4+ weeks.

Other manufacturers understand their supply chain even for smaller countries like Switzerland. One of the good examples here is HP. You usually have many servers plus parts available on stock - every reasonable printer model (less than 10k) is also available on stock. Microsoft doesn’t have any problem shipping their licenses (one or two days for electronic licenses), and shipping time for media kits is a simple next business day thing.

Why can’t IBM get their act straight and have their (expensive) stuff available on a simple next business day basis?

It’s hard to sell a customer an IBM printer if you have to tell him that it takes several weeks until he gets it. Most smaller businesses don’t buy maintenance contracts for their printers, and just buy a new one when the old one dies - this doesn’t work when you have 4 weeks of lead time for a simple InfoPrint 1532.

One thing i would be interested in: Is this better in the USA? Or in Germany?

We’ve just received a new System x3200, to serve as an infrastructure hub for our POS software at a Small Business customer. Unlike all other machines i’ve talked about before (HP DL320 G5, System x3650 vs. HP DL380 G5, System x3250, System x3650), this machine is a tower model. With IT moving more and more towards a professional service subset, tower machines are getting less and less common, but many small businesses do not see the return on investment a rack mounted server will give them. As such, IBM still produces a few decent System x servers in the tower form factor.

The x3200 brother is the rackmounted System x3250. Both of them are IBM’s low end entry systems. The x3200 we sold to our customer was one of more well endowed models, featuring redundant power supplies and hot plug SAS disks.

The disks come in a standard 3.5″ form factor, there are no 2.5″ models available (which makes sense, as towers are not really space constrained, which is clearly visible when looking at the x3200 bulky frame).

The exact configuration ordered:

• System x3250 Xeon 2.13Ghz DC, with 2×512MB Base Memory, 3.5″ HP SAS, redundant PSU
• 2x 72GB 10kRPM SAS

Unpacking and opening

The machine was shipped in a box where you’d have thought it contains a 5 year old desktop PC, meaning it was a bit bigger than the Lenovo ThinkCentre tower shipping boxes. As always, removing the machines from these boxes is not as fun when you’re alone, because the styropor sticks to the machine.

Another thing to note is that the machine shipping without any power cables, which is normally not the case. But this might’ve been a mixup at our distributor.

The machine itself is big and bulky (exactly as it looks on the photos), but the case is very well done, much better than the xSeries 226 had. Everything is tool less, and the opening mechanisms for the front and side cover work nicely, and fit like a glove when putting them back on.

Interiors

Even though this is a budget machine, the interior is done rather well. The cables are packed together nicely, and the system has room for expansion. 4x 3.5″ HP SAS disk trays, 3 PCI slots, 2 PCI-E Slots (1x, 4x). The LSI Logic SAS RAID Controller is mounted directly on the mainboard, saving expansion slots. Again, this machine only accepts 4 DIMMs, which aren’t that accessible. But this isn’t a huge problem, as maintenance on tower models has always been awkward and finicky - that’s what rack servers are for.

The machine isn’t quiet, but it isn’t loud either. I wouldn’t mind having it in my office, the noise is not a high pitched scream like you usually get from a 1U rack server. There is no inline documentation like IBM usually provides with their rack mount servers, and there’s no LightPath diagnostics either. That’s perfectly normal for this price.

What isn’t usual for this price class is the fact that this machine has redundant power supplies. While this is the norm for more expensive servers, it isn’t for entry level servers. The redundant power supplies do not cost a lot more than the normal model, and it’s always nice to have redundant power (as UPSes account for a large number of power failures, at least here in Switzerland).

Installing options

We only got a few disks with the machine, and installing them was a breeze. They are hid behind an easily openable lid, and come in a standard IBM hotplug mounting tray.

The machine we received had horrible outdated firmware, so the first step was to get everything up to speed. This worked fine with an USB floppy drive, as IBMs Update CD’s weren’t current (again). I still think there should be some method that does all this whole box-update thing via the internet. Not sure how this could be implemented without astronomic cost, but i still want it.

The Onboard LSI Logic RAID Controller supports mirroring and striping, and brings it’s own horrible management software - it’s not an IBM ServeRAID family controller. I didn’t even find a way to automatically send mails in case of a disk failure.

Booting the server

We’ve installed Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 on this machine, not using the ServerGuide procedure. Again, the install went through without any problems after supplying the LSI Logic driver on an USB floppy. I’m still waiting for Windows Server 2008 which will make this a lot easier with it’s Windows PE 2.0 based installer.

As far as my first impressions went, the disk performance is very good. It’s quite noticeable if you use 10kRPM SAS disks against 7.2kRPM SATA disks.

Resumee

Even though it’s a budget machine, the build quality and the features of the System x3200 are quite impressive (i really, really liked two PSUs in such a small machine). I still don’t like tower machines, but the System x3200 is worth it’s money if you don’t have a rack at a given location. The system is very well designed, and could even serve as a small business server for a very small business.

Also, the obligatory plug to DATALINE AG which sells this server and other IBM System x or System i servers.

In a conclusion to yesterdays post about a broken northbridge cooler in a HP DL140 G2, i got a replacement System Board shipped overnight by HP. Mostly because the customer decided that he didn’t need an On-Site carepak from HP.

So i got stuck with a probably refurbished systemboard, and instruction sheets on how to replace them. I’ve also made better pictures of the missing pin, and the whole replacement procedure. Unfortunately due to the digital camera which seems to be over 9000 years old, and the low light situation, the pictures weren’t that much better.

One thing that irked me though is what the HP rep said to me yesterday. He estimated shipping at “one or two weeks”, which is far too long for replacement parts of a still more or less modern server. On the other hand, the parts arrived today with overnight shipping from around the world. It seems that HP does better than their reps say.

Replacing the systemboard in a DL140 G2 is not as bad as one might think it is. While there are several screws to unscrew, and of course the processor replacement itself, i never had a problem during this procedure. Only one thing i wasn’t sure with - HP’s docs stated that i had to empty my entire syringe worth of thermo conductive paste onto the processor. I did that, and the processor temperature seems to be okay now.

I’ve had interesting problems today with a HP DL140 G2. The machine crashed, and it wasn’t possible to bring it back online using the integrated iLO 100. The iLO 100 had no problems in it’s event logs.

I restarted the machine a few times, and the machine brought the message that a critical error was encountered, and the system thus halted - right after the BIOS welcome screen. I tried to enter the BIOS, but failed a few times. The third one worked, and i looked at the event log in the BIOS. There were several error messages regarding voltage, but they were over a year old. I deleted all error messages, rebooted the machine until it halted again, and then entered the BIOS again. This time, there was an error Message regarding ECC Memory being defective.

I turned the machine off, set it on a table, and opened it. The problem was obvious immediately: The Northbridge cooler no longer was attached to the Northbridge. A tiny little metal nook which held the cooler in place was not found immediately - it was later located in the RAM slots.

I’m sure that i am the first and only person who opened this machine in the last few months. The Northbridge cooler obviously broke off by itself, indicating cheap manufacturing as being the problem.

This machine is a year old by now. Warranty expires tomorrow. Luckily we’ve opened a case today, and hope we can get a fix soon. I’m very interested on how this plays out with HP.

IBM Exam 000-074 is part of IBM’s Certified Systems Expert certification program. As with the similar HP0-055, the focus was a bit different than your usual Microsoft exams.

When first looking at the specs for this exams, i found the required passing score to be very low: 59%. HP’s exam had a passing score of 71%. As such, i expected a very difficult the exam, but that wasn’t the case.

This exam focused on three points:

• Normal, hardware neutral Windows/Networking Knowledge
• IBM Director Knowledge
• IBM System x hardware knowledge (especially of bigger products like the System x3850)

I’ve passed this exam with an okay score, but was guessing at almost all the IBM Director and the System x hardware knowledge. The problem here is that neither IBM Director nor 4 socket machines are being used in the small businesses i work for. The fact that i still passed shows that good guessing can give you lots of points, because the answers are sometimes rather obvious.

There was also a good deal of normal Windows Knowledge required, and several very very basic Networking questions, which could probably be answered by your average gamer kid. If you already hold an MCSE/MCSA on Windows Server 2003, you might be able to pass this exam without having touched an IBM server before.

Even though this may sound bad, i though the exam in it’s whole made a lot of sense. Most questions where detailed, and the answers where short an concise. Again, for several questions you had to know what the limitiations of a given IBM hardware platforms are. I still don’t really like this, because i don’t deal with every piece of System x hardware IBM has to offer (even though i’d like to know, that’s currently not the case).

As expected, there were many performance tuning questions which were usually answerable with general IT knowledge. You’ll just need to know which system performance values indicate what kind of performance bottleneck.

Layer One had another power outage this night, at around ~03:00.

Again, i have no idea why, and there is no information from Layer One available yet, but we can rest assured that they will state some nonsense again. As things are right now, i can only recommend against choosing Layer One for your colocation needs. They’re obviously unable to ensure even basic things like power delivery, which is a lot worse at Layer One than it is here, at home, without an UPS, directly on the power grid.

Disclaimer: I currently work for an IBM Business Partner.

I’ve written about the IBM x3650 before, and i’m generally very fond of this machine as it’s build quality and features are impressive.

However i’ve heard from several customers that they want the similar Model from HP, the DL380 G5, with the only reasoning being that the machine is going to be less expensive.

I’ve configured two almost-identical servers, and the price difference is clearly there. Please note that the configuration of the two machines is not the same, mostly due to real world restrictions in the Small Business segment when ordering machines. These restrictions are here in Switzerland - they might not exist in your country, and they might have changed in a few months. So take this with a grain of salt.

The configuration for these machines are thought to serve a Small Business with Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2.

Configurations

IBM System x3650

Configuration:

• Intel Xeon DualCore - 2.00 GHz
• 4 GB Memory (2×1 GB, 4×512MB)
• 4 x 147 GB SAS 2.5″ 10kRPM HP Disks
• RAID-Controller ServeRAID 8k 256MB BBWC
• DVD-ROM 24x/8x built-in
• PCI-X Raiser Card
• PCI-X SCSI U320 Adapter for tape drives
• Builtin Ethernet-Adapter Gigabit; 2x RJ-45 Copper
• Remote Supervisor Adapter II
• Redundant PSU
• 36 Months Warranty on-site NBD

Total list price: 9500 CHF
Warranty Upgrade to 7×24: 1000 CHF

Total: 10500 CHF

HP DL380 G5

Configuration:

• Intel Xeon DualCore - 2.66 GHz
• 4 GB Memory (2×2 GB)
• 4 x 147 GB SAS 2.5″ 10kRPM HP Disks
• RAID-Controller P400 256MB BBWC
• DVD-ROM 24x/8x built-in
• PCI-E SCSI U320 Adapter
• Builtin Ethernet-Adapter Gigabit; 2x RJ-45 Copper
• iLO Advanced License
• Redundant PSU
• 36 Months Warranty on-site NBD

Total list price: 7000 CHF
Warranty Upgrade to 7×24: 1450 CHF

Total: 8450 CHF

Conclusions

Okay, so we have a pretty major price difference between those two machines. The HP machine costs 20% less than the IBM machine. These prices don’t apply when you buy them by the truckload, but they do when you buy one or two.

Objective differences

About the IBM System x3650:

• 12 instead of 8 memory slots available
• No PCI-E slots needed to drive integrated disks (ServeRAID has a seperate slot)
• RSA II offers integrated email functionality (great advantage when not using IBM Director)
• Space for integrated tape drive (I’ve never used those, though)
• PCI-X raiser needed for U320 attachment
• Way better fan redundancy (N+N instead of N+1)

About the HP DL380 G5:

• 20% less expensive than IBM
• Greater choice on disk adapters
• iLO is standard, though KVM/Media functionality must be licensed
• More flexible memory ordering options
• U320 adapters with PCI-E is available - no PCI-X raiser card needed
• One slot always occupied by disk adapter (However, the machine has 5 PCI-E slots, the IBM has only 4)
• Less memory slots available

Unobjective differences

About the IBM System x3650:

• It’s black. Black is cool.
• The LightPath diagnostics seem much more mature than HPs new diagnostic system
• The RSA II offers an older GUI, but more features than the iLO Advanced License at a lower price point
• Rack mount kit looks more sturdy and generally better than the HP one

About the HP DL380 G5:

• Legacy PS/2 ports still available
• The front looks way better, but it’s not black

Final conclusions

Make up your own. I’ve tried to be as truthful as possible, and both machines have advantages and disadvantages. Usually the choice is already made if a customer already works with a given brand. Both vendors have pushed for different feature sets and their machines, and this shows quite clearly. The IBM machine is more expensive, and the additional capacity might not have much worth in your company. It really depends on your needs and your budget. Both machines are cool, though.

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.