HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 X3216, 8GB-U, 4LFF, non-hot-pluggable, SATA, 200W power supply, 1J VOS entry-level server

Product Information

Key changes in this generation are moving to a smaller physical footprint with an external power supply. Internally, changes were made to remove the optical drive bay, add iLO 5 management, and alter the PCIe slot configuration. We also witnessed a move from the AMD Opteron X3400 series to the newest generation’s LGA1151 Intel Xeon E-2224 and Pentium Gold G5420 processors that offer new features and more performance. There is a lot to cover, so if you were thinking about the HPE MicroServer Gen10 Plus and are familiar with the Gen10, that piece is worth going through. We like that HPE did not go with the lower-cost i340 here nor did HPE use the lower-cost i210’s. While network bandwidth has doubled, and HPE is using a higher quality NIC, one will have to use the expansion slot for 10GbE connectivity. Technically with a PCIe x16 slot, one can even use higher-speed adapters. When it comes to benchmarking storage arrays, application testing is best, and synthetic testing comes in second place. While not a perfect representation of actual workloads, synthetic tests do help to baseline storage devices with a repeatability factor that makes it easy to do apples-to-apples comparison between competing solutions. These workloads offer a range of different testing profiles ranging from “four corners” tests, common database transfer size tests, as well as trace captures from different VDI environments. All of these tests leverage the common vdBench workload generator, with a scripting engine to automate and capture results over a large compute testing cluster. This allows us to repeat the same workloads across a wide range of storage devices, including flash arrays and individual storage devices.

On the rear of the unit, we can see all of the ports and I/O surrounding a central fan. The fan is the only moving part in this generation. It is, therefore, non-redundant but half as likely to experience a fan failure as a two fan unit. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus RearCooling the CPU is a passive CPU cooler. This is flanked by two DDR4 ECC UDIMM slots. It was a nice touch that our inexpensive review unit came with a single 8GB DDR4 DIMM instead of two 4GB DIMMs. 4GB DIMMs have become less common, and the implication is that one can upgrade this server to 16GB by simply adding an 8GB DIMM. If there were two 4GB DIMMs, they would be discarded in a memory upgrade. HPE ProLiant Microserver Gen10 Motherboard ECC UDIMM And Passive CPU Heatsink

Delivers excellent quality of service (QoS) - Optimised performance predictability to meet service‑level agreements (SLAs) VDI FC Initial Login saw the MicroServer with sub-millisecond latency performance until about 41K IOPS and a peak of about 45K IOPS at 1.25ms before dropping off more. HPE supports the Pentium G5420 with a 3.8GHz frequency, 2 cores, 4MB L3 cache and support for 2400MT/s RAM. There’s also a more powerful option in the Xeon E-2224 with a 3.4GHz frequency, 4 cores, 8MB L3 cache and support for 2666MT/s RAM. For RAM, there are two DDR UDIMM slots with official support up to 32GB total. Installed Windows Server 2019 Eval on to bare metal, Installs ok, but then goes super sluggish when running Hyper-V to the point of being unusable. Updated to the latest BIOS etc using the SPP iso.

HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Overview

To the left of the fan, we have two low-profile slots for expansion. We will discuss those later in this hardware overview. Below them, one can find the DC input. With this generation, we have an external power supply so there is a power input on the rear of the unit. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus Rear Expansion ILO And DC In We are going to focus more on this in our formal MicroServer Gen10 Plus review. MicroServer Gen10 Plus v Gen10 CPU Changes Accessed from the server’s boot menu, HPE’s Intelligent Provisioning feature makes light work of OS deployment. We selected this menu option during boot-up, chose our OS from its list, pointed it at the virtual ISO drive we’d mapped to the server and left it to load Windows Server 2019 in 30 minutes. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus review: Verdict For VDI FC Monday Login the MicroServer broke 1ms at just north of 35K IOPS and peaked at 40,594 IOPS with a latency of 1.35ms before dipping some.