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Our next set of tests are our SQL workloads: SQL, SQL 90-10, and SQL 80-20. Starting with SQL, the MicroSever was able to perform at sub-millisecond latency throughout peaking at 196,799 IOPS at a latency of 639µs. At the time with thermal profile was captured, the system fan was dynamically set to just 18%. With our system having flash inside and no hard drives, we really only heard a mild whirring from the server. Noise might rank slightly above a traditional desktop, but it was a softer fan noise than say a notebook running under full load that had a small fan cranking up in speed. Performance With the single fan, some questions came up on how well the system maintained airflow and cooling under load. During our Sysbench test with the CPU nearly maxed and a heavy storage I/O load, we captured a screenshot through iLO showing the system thermal layout.
In this review, we are going to focus on what HPE delivers to its customers with the ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus so you know what you can expect. We are going to go into the hardware that makes this server on an in-depth basis. We are going to look at the system topology and management. After that, we are going to test 10 different OSes and the out-of-box experience including popular Linux, Windows, and even FreeBSD distributions. Next, we will delve into the performance of both CPU SKU options, the Intel Xeon E-2224 and Pentium Gold G5420 and compare them to the previous generation’s performance. Finally, we will end with power consumption, noise, the STH Server Spider, and our final thoughts. This will be an extremely thorough piece on the new HPE ProLiant MSG10+. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus v. Gen10 The rear of the unit has a power input, two more USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports. Beyond this, there are three video outputs. The large blue one is a legacy VGA port and there are two DisplayPort headers. If you need to run digital signage, perhaps for office dashboards or menus, the AMD Opteron X3421 has a GPU to handle this. We wanted to note, there are lower-spec dual-core options, but we suggest that if you are reading STH, get the quad core X3421 model. HPE ProLiant Microserver Gen10 RearPowered by up to four cores in the Intel® Xeon® E Processor and up to 64 GB of 3200 MT/s DDR4 ECC UDIMM, it delivers better performance for small business applications.
You can see the notch on the upper left side of the foam insert in the photo above. Moving the power supply to an external unit allowed HPE to increase the component density, clean up the cabling, and remove a fan from the assembly. MicroServer Gen10 Plus v Gen10 Motherboards With Oracle 80-20 the MicroServer hit a peak of 152,129 IOPS with a latency of 539µs before a slight drop. On the topic of bombshells, one may have noticed the heatsink difference. The new MicroServer Gen10 Plus has a much larger heatsink with copper heat pipes to aid in cooling. While the Gen10 used an AMD Opteron SoC with up to 35W TDP, the new MicroServer Gen10 Plus uses Intel CPUs with TDPs up to 71W officially. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 And Plus HeatsinksWe are going into a lot of depth here. As a result, we are going to split this section into an external hardware overview which is what one will see if they do not care about how the system works. We will then go into detail around the internal components and features before moving on to other sections of this review. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus External Hardware Overview Taking a moment to see the roadmap, upon announcement of the new server, we dissected the spec sheet of the HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus. We then did a piece on the MicroServer Gen10 Plus (or Gen10+) versus the older Gen10 revision. We are going to discuss that briefly below, but we wanted to show what this mid-generation change offers in terms of differences. Some have called that piece a review, which is something we disagree with. This piece will be our formal review of the MicroServer Gen10 Plus including common HPE options. Next in this series will be a more expansive view of what is possible. We have just shy of 20 CPUs we are testing in our MicroServer Gen10 Plus and that simply takes time. We also have various options to give you ideas regarding how you can take the server’s base and turn it into something truly unique to fit your, or your client’s needs.
In our HPE MicroServer Gen10 Plus Review we are going to cover a lot of ground, so get ready. This compact server is designed to be smaller and higher performing than the previous generation. What we have found over a few weeks of working with the system in various configurations is that this is an excellent platform. I assume Freenas ZFS will give better numbers. Will continue tests with more use cases (different NAS systems, VPN gateway role, VM). Adding iLO 5 as well as significantly higher performance CPU options means that power consumption and cost are up with this generation. We are going to show the impacts of these in our review and compare them to the Opteron-based Gen10 system. That review has so much going into it that it is taking a lot of time but we wanted to show off some of the side-by-side hardware advancements made on the new ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus in the meantime. Overall, HPE did a great job with the new MicroServer.You can see the PCIe expansion slots have moved from vertical to horizontal. In the Microserver Gen10 there was a x8 and an x1 low profile slot combination. In the Gen10 Plus, this is a PCIe gen3 x16 slot on the riser and the top slot is for a dedicated iLO enablement kit. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus Rear IO View
paper limit of 16TB doesn’t apply in real life of course. My config is 3x2TB RAID0 + 10TB (nightly scrubber), all 4 is 20dB (the max for any of my setups), even the big one from the brand called “WD” (first time trying this brand after 20years with Seagate only, they now offer 10-12TB drives with idle 20dB!) We are going to focus more on this in our formal MicroServer Gen10 Plus review. MicroServer Gen10 Plus v Gen10 CPU Changes
The motherboard tray slides out after one disconnects all of the cables including the ATX power cable and SFF-8087 SATA cable. Inside there is a very functional layout. The first thing you will notice is that the ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus has a similar footprint but is half the size of the MicroServer Gen10. That should tell you that a lot has changed, and mostly for the better. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus And Gen10 Front In our VDBench Workload Analysis the HPE MicroServer was able to put up some impressive numbers considering just how small it is. Peak highlights include 194K IOPS for 4K read, 150K IOPS for 4K write, 1.9GB/s for 64K read, and 1.7GB/s for 64K write. The MicroServer stayed under 1ms in both our SQL and Oracle test with highlights being 197K IOPS SQL, 178K IOPS SQL 90-10, 149K IOPS SQL 80-20, 134K IOPS Oracle, 172K IOPS Oracle 90-10, and 152K IOPS Oracle 80-20. The MicroServer once again saw a sub-millisecond in LC Boot with a peak of 60K IOPS. So overall when looking at how much storage I/O one can drive through the onboard SATA controller, it should be able to keep up with whichever four SATA devices you can mount inside, peaking at just under 2GB/s sequential read. All pre-configured models ship standard with one or more country-specific 6 ft/1.83m C5 power cords depending on models. The other big change here is that by moving to an Intel-based solution, HPE can use its S100i firmware and integration with its management tools instead of using the Marvell SATA RAID solution. That is still software RAID for those using VMware, however, it also means one can use HPE’s provisioning tools with the Intel PCH-based RAID. One can also use the PCIe Gen3 x16 slot to add a higher-end hardware RAID controller. MicroServer Gen10 Plus v Gen10 Side Views
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