HP Ml150 G6 – Storage newb

I’m back with the ML150! 2018 was a rough year but now that it’s in the rear view mirrors, I can sit back, reflect and move forward. I started focusing more at work to keep myself busy through a few difficult times and in mid-2018, I was involved in a large network outage that took weeks to rectify with a new network rebuild. That’s another story in itself that I won’t get into.

I’ve finished my home office and I’m eager to continue my projects, the HP ML150 and my tinkering of all electronic and IT related areas.

In my corporate setting, I’ve inherited a three node VMware ESXi cluster, a two node XenServer cluster and one lonely serer running Hyper-V about 2 years ago. The ESXi cluster had its vCSA ‘broken’ as I’ve detailed here. I resolved the vCSA issue and it’s worked great since, but that whole process had me on the edge.

This is the exact reason why I am building this ESXi node at home, so that I can learn and break things in my safe environment.

I bet that if you are visiting my site and have read my previous posts, you may be wondering what I’ve decided to do regarding storage. Storage in general, is a foreign area for me that I’d like to get learn and get better at. Keep on reading…if you want to 🙂

So the ML150 G6? Well I was able to acquire the a HP P410 Raid card with Battery Backed Write Cache and a 512mb cache memory module. My only concern about this card is and was that it will do SATA 3 (6Gbps) speeds on SAS and SATA 2 (3Gpbs) speeds on SATA interfaces. Link to the HP P410 Controller Overview.

Initially I wanted to run a few 500gb SSD’s but that’s been put on hold for now due to the Sata 2 speeds of the RAID controller. I was able to purchase two 1Tb 3.5″ Seagate SAS drives that I wanted to install but I realized that I was missing the correct cabling. I purchased Mini-SAS to SFF-8087 cables, but those are incorrect and will not work with SAS drives.

The image below shows the difference between the SATA interface and the SAS interface. The difference is obvious.

SATA vs SAS Interface

With the wrong cable purchased and wanting to use the SAS drives that I have, I ordered the following cable: Mini SAS 36P SFF-8087 to SFF-8482+15P. 

With the SAS cables still being in transit somewhere, I’ve resorted to just using the HP P410 Controller with the original Mini SAS to 4-Sata SFF-8087 cables and two regular SATA WD Green 2TB 7200RPM drives.

While reviewing my storage options, my interest peaked in ZFS and I purchased the highly recommended IBM M1015 RAID aka LSI SAS9220-8i
controller. I suspect this is something I will dig into but not just yet. Right now I have to get this server up and running as I want to tackle some VMware projects in the coming weeks.

The physical storage for now is sorted. I installed VMware ESXi 6.5 Build 4564106 onto a USB flash drive that is plugged directly onto the motherboard of the server. No need to utilize any raid controller ports nor sata ports for a small hypervisor install.

Booting the server, I entered the HP P410 controller configuration and setup RAID-0 (NO RAID) with the two, 2TB drives. This is a lab. I can afford the loss of a drive/data. This server and this datastore will not hold any of my critical data and is only a test environment.

Raid-0 will provide me with striping and that’s fine by me as I want the most speed possible in my given situation.

I had planned to install ESXi on a smaller , non protruding USB Flash drive from the manufacturer Verbatim (16gb USB2). The ESXi installation would near 75% and crash with a timeout error. After trying a few times and trying different USB ports, it turns out the flash drive was the issue. I used a completely different brand flash drive to host the ESXi installation and it worked on the first try.

Here are two snips of my VMware ESXi management interface.

That’s about it for tonight. The ESXi install took way too long because of that oddly performing flash drive.

Long term plans are to bring in a NAS with an iSCSI interface so that I can mimic an external datastore that is not directly attached to the server. I will be building my lab-corporate environment that consists of a few Domain controllers that will run a select number of features. I would like mess with DHCP split scopes, WSUS, iron out some GPO skills and mess around with VMware.

I would like to setup vCSA here at home and possibly another node to build a 2-node cluster, but that’s not yet.

Thanks for reading and till the next post!


5 thoughts on “HP Ml150 G6 – Storage newb

      1. Correct, a tricked out ML150 gen 6 with two cages and a total of 8x 1TB sata-drives running off of a smart array p410-card (ex battery bavkup though) and dual-xeons.
        It’s currently running CentOS 6 which is nearing its EOL, which is why I’m researching ways to install ESXi and also make a move to Ubuntu LTS instead for future upgrade reasons.
        It’s a complicating factor that this is my only only server and runs three for me important services; cloud storage, the CMS and my picture gallery.
        Need to get another server sooner rather than later…

        The ESXi software you installed on your ML150, was that the standard v6. 5 from VMware, or a customized version from HP?

        Reply

        1. Very nice!

          The ESXi that I’ve downloaded is not the most current(reasoning behind that). It’s version 6.5 and it’s from the VMware site directly. I did download the specific customized HP version but I got a purple screen upon booting the USB flash drive, something that other user’s have reported getting also. I’ll try to mess with the HP specific install but I’m not sure what generations it allows. The one I downloaded was Pre-Gen9, so I’d hope it would contain Gen 6 servers, but I’m uncertain.

          I will play around with this a bit more as I want to make sure I have all the hardware-driver support. Also, since VMware 6.7 is out, I went ahead and installed 6.5 so that I could mimic an upgrade from 6.5 to 6.7. This is actually something I would like to tackle at work, but I can’t willy-nilly it on a production system without fully understanding what it entails.

          Glad to see more users with ML150 G6’s. I think for a server, especially in a lab, it’s great. I don’t have the space nor a want to have a 1-2u server. A tower server is a bit more convenient with space and being able to be hid away.

          Reply

  1. Good info here!

    I have had similar reasoning, but figured I’d try HP’s customised pre-gen6 image on the “production” server at home.
    Still need to find a second hardware setup for lab work as well as contingencies. The ML150 gen sixers are getting rather long in the tooth. :-/

    Reply

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