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. Cooling 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 At the time with thermal profile was captured, the system fan was dynamically set to just 18%. With our system having flash inside and no hard drives, we really only heard a mild whirring from the server. Noise might rank slightly above a traditional desktop, but it was a softer fan noise than say a notebook running under full load that had a small fan cranking up in speed. Performance On the right rear of the unit, we find the primary system I/O. This includes four 1GbE NICs, a VGA and DisplayPort (for management) and four USB 3.2 Gen1 ports. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus Rear IO View

A new piece with this generation is the PCIe and iLO riser which we removed to get to the motherboard on the Gen10 Plus. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 And Plus Motherboards Out Of Chassis Riser Removed On Plus VDI LC Initial Login saw the MicroServer go over 1ms at about 20K IOPS and peak at 22,548 IOPS with a latency of 1.23ms. Switching over to sequential performance and starting with our 64K read, the MicroServer again had sub-millisecond performance throughout a majority of the run breaking 1ms at about 27K IOPS or 1.7GB/s and went on to peak at about 31K IOPS or 1.9GB/s at 4ms before dropping off some. You can see the PCIe expansion slots have moved from vertical to horizontal. In the Microserver Gen10 there was a x8 and an x1 low profile slot combination. In the Gen10 Plus, this is a PCIe gen3 x16 slot on the riser and the top slot is for a dedicated iLO enablement kit. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus Rear IO ViewOur readers will likely see these as a middle ground between using Intel i210/ i340 NICs and using lower quality Realtek NICs which cost pennies in a bill of materials. In this class of server, the Broadcom BCM5720 solution is more than acceptable. HPE ProLiant Microserver Gen10 Motherboard Overview

In our VDBench Workload Analysis the HPE MicroServer was able to put up some impressive numbers considering just how small it is. Peak highlights include 194K IOPS for 4K read, 150K IOPS for 4K write, 1.9GB/s for 64K read, and 1.7GB/s for 64K write. The MicroServer stayed under 1ms in both our SQL and Oracle test with highlights being 197K IOPS SQL, 178K IOPS SQL 90-10, 149K IOPS SQL 80-20, 134K IOPS Oracle, 172K IOPS Oracle 90-10, and 152K IOPS Oracle 80-20. The MicroServer once again saw a sub-millisecond in LC Boot with a peak of 60K IOPS. So overall when looking at how much storage I/O one can drive through the onboard SATA controller, it should be able to keep up with whichever four SATA devices you can mount inside, peaking at just under 2GB/s sequential read. The power supply is a 180W LiteOn unit which looks like it could power an enormous laptop. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus LiteOn External Power Supply On the topic of CPUs, we are going to have benchmarks of the MicroServer with both the Pentium G5420 and the Intel Xeon E-2224 but we can say the CPU performance is several times that of the older MicroServer Gen10. This is a huge upgrade. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 And Plus Motherboards Side By SideBasic RAID is provided by the embedded Smart Array S100i SR Gen10 controller, which supports software-managed stripes and mirrors. You can upgrade to fast SAS3 storage as the Gen10 Plus supports HPE’s Smart Array E208i-p SR Gen10 PCI-E adapter which also brings RAID5 arrays into the storage equation. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus review: Maintenance and expansion 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. With Oracle 80-20 the MicroServer hit a peak of 152,129 IOPS with a latency of 539µs before a slight drop.

With the single fan, some questions came up on how well the system maintained airflow and cooling under load. During our Sysbench test with the CPU nearly maxed and a heavy storage I/O load, we captured a screenshot through iLO showing the system thermal layout. paper limit of 16TB doesn’t apply in real life of course. My config is 3x2TB RAID0 + 10TB (nightly scrubber), all 4 is 20dB (the max for any of my setups), even the big one from the brand called “WD” (first time trying this brand after 20years with Seagate only, they now offer 10-12TB drives with idle 20dB!) The other key feature we wanted to point out is with the two USB Type-A ports on the front of both units. The new MicroServer Gen10 Plus upgrades these to USB 3.2 Gen2 ports which means they are capable of 10Gbps operation. MicroServer Gen10 Plus v Gen10 Rear you wanna compare xeon anything, you scale up performance with cores, but in each case, consumption will be horrid you want to compare embeds like top routers Nighhawk, WRT32, ok, they eat just a bit less energy but 4 to 10x slower performance on all ciphers – cant serve more than 1 userOn the topic of bombshells, one may have noticed the heatsink difference. The new MicroServer Gen10 Plus has a much larger heatsink with copper heat pipes to aid in cooling. While the Gen10 used an AMD Opteron SoC with up to 35W TDP, the new MicroServer Gen10 Plus uses Intel CPUs with TDPs up to 71W officially. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 And Plus Heatsinks Standard on the unit, one gets a minimal iLO 5 experience. All management is in-band as standard which means no out of band NIC nor shared NIC. You are not managing the MicroServer Gen10 Plus remotely directly through iLO out of the box. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus ILO Enablement Kit P13788 B21

The MicroServer finished our SQL tests with sub-millisecond latency with a peak of 149,358 IOPS at a latency of 642.7µs in our SQL 80-20 before falling off a bit. From a performance perspective, we ran our Applications Analysis Workloads as well as our VDBench Workload Analysis. For Applications Analysis Workloads we started off with SQL Server. Here we saw a 3,146.43 TPS with an average latency of 24ms with 1VM. Moving to Sysbench, again with 1VM, the MicroServer was able to hit 1,105.57 TPS, with an average latency of 28.94ms, and a worst-case scenario latency of 90.08ms. Considering most use-cases for this server are test/dev, homelab, or SMB, being able to run the workloads is almost just as important as the performance being measured. The motherboard tray slides out after one disconnects all of the cables including the ATX power cable and SFF-8087 SATA cable. Inside there is a very functional layout. We wanted to point out a few key features. There is still a USB 2.0 Type-A internal port. We wish this could have been a USB 3 port but this is the same as the previous generation. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus Internal USB Type A For those who are thinking that they can use the Pentium G5420 with its integrated GPU to drive output, we are sorry to disappoint you. That requires OEMs to do some extra and more costly work since Intel made some changes with this generation. As a result, the MicroServer Gen10 Plus does not have that feature. Final Words

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The DIMMs and expansion slots have swapped sides between the MicroServer Gen10 and Gen10 Plus. You can see how the density has increased significantly. HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus And Gen10 Ram Side BIOS is from AMI, triggers Marwell and Broadcom first, you can set them up to set up hardware RAID etc which you won’t do, but be sure boot time will be very long thanks to this. You can set TDP to 12(!)W to 35W. In our HPE MicroServer Gen10 Plus Review we are going to cover a lot of ground, so get ready. This compact server is designed to be smaller and higher performing than the previous generation. What we have found over a few weeks of working with the system in various configurations is that this is an excellent platform.