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Upgrading the HP Microserver Gen 8 with a P222 RAID card

I am quite a fan of HPs Microserver range and have used the HP Microserver Gen 8 since soon after its release a couple of years ago - indeed it replaced my previous HP Microserver N54L.

I upgraded it as soon as it arrived to have a 128GB SSD boot drive in the optical drive bay running off a Startech PCI Express SATA card and I installed 4 x 3TB drives in the drive cage running off the integrated HP B120i RAID controller. I also upgraded the RAM to 6GB and swapped out the Celeron G1610T for a Core i3 3220T CPU, which made it more than adequate for its intended purpose.

As the B120i does not support RAID5 I set the drives up as 4 x RAID 0 arrays (basically JBOD) and used Microsofts Storage Spaces technology to provide redundancy via the use of a Parity space, effectively replicating RAID5 in software.

While I have been relatively happy using Storage Spaces - after all it is free with the Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials OS I am using - the technology fails to live up to its promise; at least in its current iteration. Performance, especially write performance, is not too good, monitoring for failed disks is difficult and some of the possible advantages of software RAID, such as using drives of different sizes, adding new drives to an existing array etc, are not as flexible as you may hope.

The proper answer to this is to use an HP RAID card - as it will integrate well with the existing server hardware - however I initially dismissed this as they are very expensive - considerably more expensive than the HP Microserver itself! The P222 is around �400 new in the UK as I type!

When a P222 came up on one of the forums I belong to at �160 I thought id snap it up - it would be interesting to see how much better it is than Storage Spaces in terms of both performance and functionality.

Upgrading to the P222


Unlike the image above, my P222 came with a Low Profile bracket, which is perfect for the Microserver. Also in the box you get a battery pack and a 512MB cache module.

The first issue was to migrate the OS drive from the PCIe SATA card to the internal B120i controller, and attach the Mini SAS connector to the new P222 card.

Connecting the disks in the drive cage to the P222 is as easy as you may hope - unplug the Mini SAS plug from the motherboard and move it to the P222. The controller card picks up the existing array configuration that was configured on the B120i, so there is nothing more to do! It appears that pretty much all modern HP RAID cards automatically pick up the configuration of arrays that were set up on another HP controller, which is rather handy.
In order to connect my SATA SSD onto the B120i I needed an SFF-8087 SAS to 4 x SATA cable, as shown above. Luckily the seller included one in the box, as his card was pulled from a Microserver, but if you need one they are only �3-4 off eBay.

The B120i supports 6Gbps on Ports 1 & 2 and 3Gbps on Ports 3 & 4, so I attached the SSD to Port 1. The main concern that I had was that the drive needs to be included in a single drive RAID0 array in order for the server to recognise and boot from it (without changing the settings to AHCI, which causes fan noise issues). I didnt know whether creating a RAID0 array on the B120i would wipe the disk, but it turned out that it didnt - the data on the drive was untouched.

To ensure I wouldnt lose any data during the RAID0 conversion I took an image of the boot drive using Macrium Reflect Free and cloned the drive contents onto a spare SSD (which I then used on first boot to ensure that nothing terrible would occur).

Once the RAID0 was created and I changed the Controller boot order, so the server tried to boot from the B120i first and the P222 second, and everything came up as before - Windows Server 2012 R2 automatically picked up the P222 without me having to install any drivers from HP & the Storage Space was all present and correct.

Converting the Storage Spaces to Hardware RAID5

The process of converting the Storage Spaces to RAID5 on the controller is destructive so I had to ensure my backup was up to date. I personally use FreeFileSync to manually back up folders on my server onto 2 x 5TB external USB3 drives. What I like about this product, asides from the fact it is free, is that it allows you to Mirror sets of folders, which can be filtered to only contain a subset of the data/subfolders within that group.

To change the storage from using 4xRAID0 arrays and Storage Spaces to hardware RAID5, I simply deleted the RAID0 arrays in HPE Smart Storage Administrator and created a new RAID5 array, ignoring any configuration in Windows.

Disk Space
Performance

Before I performed the upgrade I ran a few simple disk benchmarks to see what the performance of the Storage Space on the B120i was. These are shown below.




Once I had upgraded to the P222, I was interested to see whether having the 512MB cache and a better controller would affect performance.




As can be seen, there is a performance increase (3% Read and 36% Write) when moving from the B120i to the P222 whilst still using Storage Spaces.

With the RAID5 array in place, I had to wait until the logical drive had finished its Parity initialisation in order to get a reliable metric. The message "Logical Drive 1 is undergoing parity initialization" is shown against the controller in the Smart Storage Administrator while this process is being performed. It does take quite a long time - somewhere around 16 hours in my case.



With the P222 we can see the multi-threaded sequential 128KB read is over 2.3X as fast and the write is just under 5.8X as fast.

Conclusion

The main benefits of the upgrade are:

1. An increase in storage space from 7.2GB to 8.18GB
2. Over a doubling in Read performance
3. Almost 6X write performance increase
4. Improved disk health monitoring capabilities

I am not sure whether the above would be worth a �400 outlay for a new card, but if you can source one around half price or under second hand then it offers a nice improvement to your existing Microserver setup.

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