What about HP Servers?

[Mark Carrara]

I read the post about recommended hardware, but I still have a question. We have an older HP Proliant DL180 G6 server that is being retired. It has 4x2TB SAS hard drives. An 8 core Xeon CPU and a 4 port GigaBit NIC. It only has 8 Gigabytes of RAM, that I will increase to at least 32 or 64 depending on cost. Will this work for FreeNAS?

The use case I am thinking about is as shared storage for a two host Citrix Xenserver cluster. We have about 350 users. Xenapp may be in the future as we move to Chromebooks. Will FreeNAS work in this use case?

 

[Ericloewe]

It depends.

If FreeNAS installs without a problem, it should work. God knows what kind of "innovations" HP threw in that will complicate things, though. I guess that if it runs 9.3, it won't have any trouble with 10. The transition to UEFI/GPT was painful for some, though.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Immediate issue could be the SAS card. If it's got the "B110i" SmartArray controller that's just a dumb controller, that one is OK. If it has any of the P-series (eg P410) that card needs to get tossed immediately and replaced by an HBA that won't get in ZFS's way.

Second up is that I don't know if it's got the chops to handle a heavy virtualization load. With only four slow drives you'd have a pretty low number of IOPS available from pool; while ARC/SLOG can help offset that you could very easily bog it down under load. If the workload fits almost completely into ARC (which it might in XenApp's case) then it could work but I can't say specifically.