I’ve heard nothing but good things about HP Proliant N40L Microservers. Those of you who have ever spent more than 5 minutes with popey know he’s all about them. They seem like great little boxes; quiet, Hold 4+1 drives, and with an optional ilo card can be totally headless. Add drives and some Ubuntu server and you’re good to go. Or in Robbie’s case, a few of them with Ubuntu Server and OpenStack:
Compared to my meager set up:
Anyway; the Proliant comes with 4 drive bays. Unfortunately one of them is for the OS drive, and yet it comes with an entire empty top part where they expect you to put an optical disc drive, which in today’s world of MAAS is a waste of space, since we’re all about managed PXE installs now. So if you want to put an OS drive there instead, you’ll want this bit of kit so you can stick an OS drive in there and then have the slick bays open for data disks. You’ll need a right angle SATA cable and MOLEX->sata power converter as well, which is why mine is still in pieces. A nice external eSATA port means I can also just reuse my old existing enclosure.
While Robbie will surely be jujuing on his openstack, I will be using my micro to deploy the same juju charms, except as LXC containers. Since juju abstracts the cloud provider stuff from me, I can prototype my little deployments on my server and be reasonably certain that my stuff will be OpenStack-ready, except for scale of course, I couldn’t test a 40 node Hadoop deployment on my server. But I can certainly deploy most things.
If you work at HP and are reading this, give me a little slot on the side for an SSD OS drive and I’ll be a happy clam. Preloaded with Ubuntu Server and I’d be even happier. :)
(Note, this post has nothing to do with the previous XBMC post, whatsoever. >_> )