So, yesterday I got myself one of these: HP Proliant ML115 G5 for a cool £109 inc. VAT! Bargain! Has a Dual-core AMD Opteron 1214, 512MB of RAM (which I popped in a £50 OCZ 4GB kit to get that up to a good level) and a 160GB SATA HDD.
Why? Well my old home server (which ran Solaris) popped it’s cloggs a couple of weeks ago and I wanted my desktop computer back!
It’s a nice little machine but has a few issues that people Googling and coming across this might like to hear solutions too:
- VMware ESXi 3.5 Update 2 DOES work on this machine. You have to boot it off of a USB pendrive though. Thankfully there is a USB port on the motherboard inside the case! So you can embed a pendrive in there.
- FreeBSD 7.0 RELEASE will NOT run. You have to get the latest STABLE snapshot CD (June ’08 onwards) and it will then work.
- OpenSolaris 2008.05 snv_86 will NOT boot. The only one that will is snv_95, and even then it won’t detect the network card. It’s expected to be all fixed in snv_97 if the bug reports are to believed (when that will appear, nobody knows).
- Solaris 10u5 will NOT run on this machine either, for the same reasons as OpenSolaris.
Personally, I recommend the ESXi route – especially as Update 2 is finally fixed. Other than the fact that non-Windows OS’s have issues on this server, it’s a lovely quiet little box. I mean, almost silent – even with 4 SATA disks inside. The build quality is top notch. For the price, grab a couple and use them for testing out network virtualization setups… one idea I have is on as an iSCSI server and the other as a diskless ESXi. Maybe you could use 3 and test out VMotion 
Nice to see someone else ordering one of these, for precisely the same purpose of using ESX 3i. The price is fantastic!
“Other than the fact that non-Windows OS’s have issues on this server”
I don’t think that’s entirely correct as HP themselves have certified Suse, RHEL and Netware on this server.
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/sm/WF06b/15351-15351-241434-3328424-3328424-3683705-3752446.html
[you can probably ignore the bit about the 800GHz front side bus]
That’s quite a recent addition
It was Windows only when I bought it.
I see the original specs say 8Gb max memory, is this correct?
Also, is the socket AM2 or 2+
I’ve got one of these servers too. I was wondering if you have any success with making it quieter? I’m not sure if a different spec case fan and CPU cooler or even PSU would work with it, due to the monitoring stuff. Have you got the LO100c remote management card for it? I can SSH into it, but not sure how to modify the values, if that is even possible.