HP Microserver as Amahi host

[jingoman]

Does anyone use the above hardware (HP Microserver) for their Amahi server? If so can you comment on the performance, etc?

I have one of these, and the original intention was to run an ESXi farm. From this farm, a primary aim was to have my home NAS device/server, for media streaming, etc. The secondary purpose was as a test lab for Microsoft technologies (supporting work & certification needs).

So I made 1 VM for Amahi, 1 as a Windows Server 2008 R2 domain controller. Both work fine, and seem fairly stable.

However, when I added in my 1st 2TB HDD to be used as a storage pool drive, and copied the initial movie files to it, I was recordning an average throughput across the network of 4.0-4.2MBps... It is currently recognised as a 100MBps network (as everything currently plugs into the back of my ADSL router), and so I would expect somewhere between 10-14MBps.

I am wondering if I would get better performance if I ran the Amahi server as a "bare metal" install, rather than a VM, and I was hoping someone else may have used this Microserver in either or both configurations, to provide me with insights before I actually have to tear apart what I have already done?

Many thanks in advance.

[snakey147]

Hi,

I'm running the HP Microserver with Amahi installed natively, just checked and according to Windows 7 I'm getting about 10.5MB/s uploading a file over Samba.

My devices are connected at 100Mb/s in the same 3Com switch.

Hope that helps!

[jingoman]

thanks for the info.

the timings i was getting were from SCP file copies via SSH. If i use the samba share from the linux host in OS X Finder, I do see transfers edging towards 10MBps. So this does seem to get nearer to maximum throughputs on a network at 100MBps speeds.

However, if I try to do any copying to the Amahi/linux server while I am already streaming some media to a separate XBMC PC on the network, I get endless buffering of the video playback. The network transfer seems to take priority and retains decent throughputs in the main. Do you see the same behaviour?

I don't actually run Amahi anymore as I got annoyed by the custom configs that Amahi would overwrite to my own customisations, but setup a Ubuntu Server 11.04 installation with the same servers/applications running, including greyhole, samba, LAMP, etc. I am thinking of adding a 2nd NIC to the device to try to alleviate the above buffering issue. I guess you haven't done this at present?