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I have come across this really good deal on an HP Proliant ML115 (this is a UK based company – apologies to those of you from overseas). This is the AMD CPU equivilent of the Intel CPU based ML110. It is the G4 model which has now been superceeded by the G5 – though these are brand new machines that HP are obviously now dumping to resellers at bargain prices.
I can’t vouch for the ML115 as I have never owned one but my ML110 G4 server works great for my VMWare ESX test server.
I’m not sure how the ML115’s AMD dual core CPU stacks up performance wise against the ML110 Intel Xeon equivilent – I’d be interested to know.
Also, interestingly in this HP forum it is claimed that the ML115 G4 will run VMWare ESX v3.5 ok. If this is the case it could make for a very cheap ESX test server. All you’d need to add is extra memory and maybe an additional hard disk or two.
Let me know if you’ve had any experiences with running ESX on either of these entry level Proliant servers – I’d be interested to hear from you.
I just purchased a ML115 (445847-425 HP ProLiant ML115 G1, Opteron 1210, 2x512MB, 1x160GB NHP-SATA) and it works out of the box with ESX 3.5. The only thing you have to run a script after installation (see http://communities.vmware.com/message/818309). However, you can’t RAID the disks.
Does your e200 card allow you to run RAID1/RAID5 VMFS disks with ESX 3.5?
Hi Jonasb,
Thanks for the message and congratulations on your new ML115. I am finding that my ML110 G4 works great with ESX v3.5.
I can confirm that the e200 card does allow you to run various RAID levels (ie: 0, 1 and 5) with ESX. The RAID functionality itself is performed at a hardware level so ESX is not aware of it. All ESX see’s are the disks that are presented to it after they are configured with the Array Configuration Utility (ACU).
I am running a pair of SATA 320GB disks in a RAID 0 configuration. I chose RAID 0 due my ML110 only being a test server and the extra performance received from running the disks in a striped set.
Hope this helps,
Simon
Excellent. I will definitely consider the e200. Me on the other hand want to run RAID1 since if the disk would fail I would spend many hours re-building my test environment 🙂
Did ESX work right away with ML110 G4 or did you have to run the script aswell to get it to work?
I also noticed there’s a G5 version of the ML110 available so that might be a better choice today (if it works)?
Hi Jonasb,
I am going to run some bench marking tests against the ML110 G4 shortly to get some indication of performance. Once I get the results I will post them here, on my blog.
The ML110 G4 worked first time after installing ESX v3.5 – no need to run any scripts at all. I am hoping to by a G5 model soon and will let you know how I get on with installing ESX onto it.
All the best,
Simon
Cool. If you also tell us HOW you make the benchmarking, I can do the same and we can compare ML110 G4 and ML115 G1 and then maybe te ML110 G5 later on.
First, thanks for the articles and links, very helpful.
As the ML110 G5 has been mentioned in previous comments …
Just got a ML110 G5 so, my experience thus far. This is kind of for learning/testing, and currently I know very little about ESX, so any issues could well be things I’m doing wrong.
Trying a few different configurations/setups to try and make more sense of things.
Standard machine – no modifications. Use onboard NIC and storage controller.
ESX installer claims there’s no network adapter and allows you to go no further on the installation.
Installed HP NC110T PCI Express Gigabit Server Adapter and the ESX installer sees this and proceeds.
Installation completes, but no storage available for creating a datastore.
Switching to SATA enabled in the BIOS and trying to install ESX, and ESX installer then says it can see no disk (not taken this any further at this point, but I guess the link jonasb mentions may help).
Installed the E200 controller. Run 2 disks off as RAID-0, and leave the system disk connected via onboard.
Installed ESX as before (SATA not enabled in BIOS). ESX installs, and sees the array thats available through the E200. Configure datastore using this array. As a cheat, in order to access the disk space through ESX that is available on the disk connected to the onboard controller, I just symlinked from the datastore created to the spare partition I’d created on the system disk.
Will probably mess around with ESX itself first before returning to trying to get the onboard SATA sorted.
Looks like the great pricing Lamda-Tek has ended. The ML115’s are now back to normal type prices. Drop me a line if you come across any other vendors offering good deals.
Simon 🙂
Have you tried to use your HP ML115 and the SmartArray e200 as boot controller?
When i tried this it always hangs (booting ESX) during scanning the array for partiions!
kind regards,
Reinhard
Hi Reinhard,
I’ve never tried this before on an ML115 using an E200 as the boot controller. If this is a test rig then I’d recommend installing ESX on the disk(s)attached to the onboard SATA controller and then running your VMFS partition off of a RAIDED drive set on the the E200.
Hope this helps. Let me know how you get on.
Cheers,
Simon
Anyone have any success with ML115, E200 controller and RAID-5 configuration? Looking to purchase this configuration and use ESX. My initial concern was the AMD Processor, however, I’m reading more problems with RAID.
Thanks in advance.
– FR