HP ML350 G5 – 26 Months Later (Part 2)
Well, sorry about that. Got a bit distracted after I started writing up my experiences with the ML350 and buried in a project and forgot to get back here. And I’m still a bit buried, so I’ll keep this a bit shorter than I might otherwise.
First, the good stuff: Overall, I love this server. It’s quiet (well, as long as the ambient temperature stays under 30 degrees or so), which is a real plus in a small business where the server may well live in a room where people have to work. It’s a workhorse. It runs at 95% memory utilization 24/7, with CPU utilization running in the range of 5-10% most of the time. That’s pretty good, and means that if I could put more RAM in here I could definitely run more VMs. The thing that makes all this possible is the incredibly good disk I/O subsystem. With a P400 RAID controller, and 8x 2.5” SAS disks for the main array, plus a separate Adaptec SAS controller that runs a pair of 750GB SATA drives (RAID 0) for miscellaneous transient storage (ISOs and such), and a pair of SAS drives in RAID1 for the boot disk, this server can really handle a lot. I could wish it had more network I/O built in. If I were buying one today, I’d spec it with at least one, and probably two, quad-port GigE NICs. More and more I’m finding that networking is my limiting factor. I’ve added an Intel dual-port server NIC, and that helps, but it’s just not enough for the kinds of things I end up doing.
Overall, this is an extremely well build server, and it’s a joy to work on. I had to swap out a couple of FB-DIMMs that went out in our last heat wave, and it was trivial to do it. Everything is well marked and easy to get at, and I only had to unclip the fan shroud to easily pop the DIMMs.
So, what don’t I like? The base I/O isn’t that great, with only a single NIC (Broadcom at that), and only the P200i for a built in RAID controller. But both of those are easily fixable. Less easily fixed is that the only way to upgrade the CPUs from dual-core to quad-core is to change the motherboard. That really is annoying, since with the dual-core CPUs the box is limited to 16 GB of RAM. If I could just buy new CPUs, I could easily extend the life of this server by quite a bit, since the quad-core CPU configuration supports 32 GB of RAM, and at a very reasonable cost. But that’s not an option.
And one ongoing annoyance is that the built-in iLO port, which takes the place of a second NIC, is of very limited usefulness without buying a very expensive add-on software package. Give me a break, HP! It should not cost extra to use the iLO as a spare management NIC for whatever I want to use it for. (And I have the same complaint about the iSCSI addon for the integrated multi-function NIC.)
So, would I buy one? Oh, yeah. And I’d really love to get my hands on the new G6 version, which looks like a very worthy successor. But that’s probably not going to happen any time soon, unless HP sends me an eval unit again.
Charlie.