MicroServer Gen8 is noisy

[subsix]

Paul,

I paid less than 150 EUR for the H220, much less than half of what I paid for the Microserver. No question, that thing is not cheap :-((. What sweetens the deal is that that controller offers 6Gb/s on ALL ports and is also certified for Solaris (I am using SmartOS). Might well be that it would also support drive hot plugging but I never tried...

With all that said the HBA is not officially supported on the Microserver. But taking into consideration that the controller is officially supported in the ML310 and looking at how similar that is to the Microserver I thought I'd take the chance and try it.

See the Microserver QuickSpecs for (officially) supported drives: https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/V2/getdocument.aspx?docname=c04123182

From what I recall the B120i did not read the HD sensor in AHCI mode - the H220 does... with at least one genuine HP drive installed.

Best regards,

Peter

[Jimmy Vance]

This issue is all about iLO and controller sensor data and has nothing to do with what brand of disk is installed in the system. 

I'm still providing everyones feedback to the MicroServer program team and hoping there will be a fix released soon.

[paulgear]

Thanks for your continued work on this Jimmy.  I hope we see something out of it soon.

[ibhpgb]

I guess my question is: Will there be a fix for the fan / temp / sensors ? A month? or two?

I will purchase something soon, and the microserver would work, but not without a fix.

[subsix]

Jimmy,

Thanks a million for your continued support raising awareness at HP for this issue.

I fully agree that this is an iLO and controller/HD sensor data issue. I would also want to support the statement that the HD brand shouldn't make a difference. With the B120i in AHCI mode it didn't make a difference - regardless of whether that genuine HP drive or a WD RED was installed I never got below 30% fan speed. and communicated that to HP in my support case). 

However, it does make a significant difference with the bays connected to the H220. It was hard for me to believe but adding that one HP genuine drive to the 2 WD RED's in my setup activated the "HD Max" sensor in iLO and brought fan speed down to 9-11% (compared to the 30% without the HP drive). That never happened on the B120i in AHCI mode.

One more thing - in case someone from the Microserver program management reads this: HP should be aware of the below consequences when deciding to leave this noise issue unresolved:

1) They lose people wanting to use a Debian or Ubuntu based "SMB server" distributions like Zentyal or Univention UCS. Drivers for the B120i are not available, so all one can do is switch to AHCI mode...

2) They lose everyone wanting to benefit from using ZFS (Illumos/Solaris and derivatives, FreeBSD and derivative NAS distributions,...) e.g. for data integrity. Same here, AHCI mode is required...

3) Even with the supported OS'es: The B120i is a "fake RAID" controller. If it goes bad your chances for successful data recovery are limited (you'd need another B120i to connect the disks to). Not an issue in AHCI mode...

I understand that the OS'es mentioned above are unsupported from HP's perspective. But I wonder whether they really understand what OS's SMBs use today... It has always been the software and OS that defines what hardware to buy...

The Microserver is marketed for "micro and small businesses" - i.e. for situations where the server has to "live" in the single office room. The current state renders the Microserver useless for anything apart from Windows Server or ESXi. (Maybe except if you are deaf...)

I'd be happy to hear that they've changed their mind and will fix the B120i AHCI mode noise issue.

Peter

[psikey]

Ref: "3) Even with the supported OS'es: The B120i is a "fake RAID" controller. If it goes bad your chances for successful data recovery are limited (you'd need another B120i to connect the disks to). Not an issue in AHCI mode..."

Not actually true. The drives will plug into my HP P222 RAID card and be recognised.

Also, if you use the B120i as a group of single RAID0 drives they can each be accessed as NTFS drives when connected to another WIndows PC.

I started one of the early threads on the fan issue: http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/6032-g8-microserver-be-aware-of-fan-issue-add-in-cards/

My G8 with updated Xeon E3-1265LV2 45W CPU is currently working quiet (6% fan) with 4 x 4TB WD RED drives plus a 120GB Intel 520 SSD in the optical bay. Each drive is configured as separate single disk RAID0 volumes with the SSD being the boot drive. I then use Stablebit DrivePool to create a single large storage space across the 4 x 4TB drives with folder duplication as needed. This is a Windows 8 Pro setup so no help for Linux users.

The G8 does obviously work fine with my HP P222 card for the storage drives and the single SSD still on the B120i optical port but I don't need the extra space at the moment (via the rear mini-SAS port extender) prefering lower power consumption so I'm not using the P222 card yet (adds ~20w to standby power). Plus with the P222 being passive cooled and monitored by iLO4 it does put the idle fan speed higher to ~ 9-16% depending on load.

I am still waiting for the AHCI mode to work correctly so I can have the drives spin-down saving even more energy during extended standby times. You can't have drive spindown with HP RAID controllers. If the drives could spin-down the Server would only pull ~35W idling. With the N54L I had I could get even lower at ~28W but thats mainly because it doesn't have iLo4 constantly consuming ~4W even when the server off (but plugged in).

Oh, forgot to mention that the WD RED drive temperatures are shown in iLO4 when configured with the B120i, but not in AHCI. Shows HD Max at 35C with CPU at 40C.

The G8 Microserver is a real power beast when upgrade with the E3-1265LV2 45W CPU, P222 RAID card and 16GB RAM, yet still quiet enough for my living room and low power usage for its performance. Even with the CPU flat out running Prime for over 2hrs it stayed cool (60C) with fan reaching ~39%.

[thwn]

Hi Peter

I completely agree.

I was planning to buy a MicroServer to use Ubuntu + ZFS, but without a solution to the AHCI fan problem this is a no go. I would even be willing to wait for some more time, if HP would confirm that this is a bug and that it will be fixed any time soon.

Regarding the support state for the various OSes you mentioned: at least Ubuntu 12.04 is fully HP supported on the MicroServer Gen8, according to this page here: https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=emr_na-c03793258

Thomas

Moderator Note: [Updated with new links]

[subsix]

@Thomas,

Thanks for the info regarding Ubuntu. Happy to hear that that OS is supported now. Interestingly, according to the following page the Ubuntu certification has been performed in AHCI mode (B120i driver unavailable).

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/km/search#q=microserver%20gen8%20linux%20support&t=All&sort=relevancy&numberOfResults=25

I would expect that this also means that a reasonable noise level can be achieved... would be interesting to hear what configuration (firmware and iLO versions, HDs) had been used...

Peter

Moderator Note: [Updated with new links]

[subsix]

@psikey,

Thanks for the info that a B120i RAID could be reconnected to a P222 without data loss. I didn't try that but my experience with "software" RAID controllers has been fairly negative…

No question, with your Windows setup you could use the "single drive RAID0" workaround. However, that only works for OS's where a B120i driver is available (Windows, Red Hat,…). And it is out of question that the P222 works well as that is a supported card.

I share your concerns about the higher power consumption with an add on card installed (the H220 in my case). I'd be happy too to get rid of that and get back to using the B120i in AHCI mode…

For now I am okay with the H220 installed - Low noise is much more important in our current situation than power consumption. Let's hope that HP gets this resolved….

Peter

[TeoCiontu]

I've  bought microserver gen8 1610T for about 220 euros, last Friday ( it was black Friday here in Romania). A good deal, I said to myself. Now I'm thinking to return it for the noise problem.

I want to use it in my room as NAS and Media Server (upgrading the video board).

But the noise is not acceptable for such low power CPU machine. The whole idea of such devices is low noise and low energy consumption . This is the selling point.

What do you think guys, is there any chance to be fixed  by bios update ? 

Did someone tried Windows 8 with the raid controller ?

Thank you for pushing HP support for a fix.

I'll make a ticket too.

teo