Some information about HP T620 Plus Flexible Thin Client machines for network appliance builds...

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kapone

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May 23, 2015
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It is. But remember, the i3 does not have AES-NI, so, apples to apples...:)
Code:
AMD GX-420CA:
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
aes-256-ecb      50266.29k    52472.04k    53500.50k    53761.02k    53832.36k

i3-3220
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
aes-256-ecb     199626.74k   235043.58k   242270.12k   245337.07k   245620.82k
 
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BLinux

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It is. But remember, the i3 does not have AES-NI, so, apples to apples...:)
Code:
AMD GX-420CA:
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
aes-256-ecb      50266.29k    52472.04k    53500.50k    53761.02k    53832.36k

i3-3220
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
aes-256-ecb     199626.74k   235043.58k   242270.12k   245337.07k   245620.82k
good point... i didn't know the i3 didn't have aesni
 

kapone

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May 23, 2015
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I'm not sure how your remark ties into the conversation here.... OpenVPN being single threaded, it seems aes-ni only makes a 33% improvement using the testing methodology @nthu9280 pointed to.
What I was trying to say was that even with AES-NI, you have a 2Ghz core. That can only go so far. Once you start doing multiple instances of OpenVPN with a load balancer and other jiggeryjug, then you're using your entire CPU.

A faster core helps even with an AES-NI enabled CPU.
 
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BLinux

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What I was trying to say was that even with AES-NI, you have a 2Ghz core. That can only go so far. Once you start doing multiple instances of OpenVPN with a load balancer and other jiggeryjug, then you're using your entire CPU.

A faster core helps even with an AES-NI enabled CPU.
ah, i get you. so you're saying if there were 4x VPN sessions, each using 1 out of the 4 cores, one might get even better aggregate throughput. But openvpn being single threaded, at least within a single vpn session, it will be limited to something like the numbers previously shown (assuming that test @nthu9280 pointed to has some 1:1 correlation to actual performance).

All that said, I wonder why @nthu9280 previously posted numbers (here https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...rserver-e200-9a-or-e200-9b.20931/#post-195071) are so different than mine:

Code:
time openvpn --test-crypto --secret /tmp/secret --verb 0 --tun-mtu 20000 --cipher aes-256-cbc --ncp-disable
23.849u 0.023s 0:23.95 99.6%    838+177k 0+0io 19pf+0w
vs. mine:
Code:
# time openvpn --test-crypto --secret /tmp/secret --verb 0 --tun-mtu 20000 --cipher aes-256-cbc
Wed Jul 25 10:55:51 2018 disabling NCP mode (--ncp-disable) because not in P2MP client or server mode
real    0m14.717s
user    0m14.682s
sys    0m0.025s
~24s vs ~15s?
 

kapone

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I honestly have no clue. They should be similar, because these are raw tests, and any additional hardware (like NICs) does not affect these tests. Faster RAM may be (I'm shooting in the dark now)?
 

BLinux

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@BLinux. Not sure if the drivers & implementation (FreeBSD vs Linux) has an impact on the performance. Mine is PfSense and I think you are using Linux / CentOS.
yeah, that is a difference. i wonder if perhaps it has to do with version of openssl libraries? what version do you have on pfsense?
 

BLinux

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FYI. I picked up few more of these units and found one that does not have the mSATA slot on the motherboard. I guess there are some versions of the motherboard without the mSATA slot. So, if that's important to you, probably should ask seller to verify before ordering. I've updated the OP.
 
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Thomas H

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FYI. I picked up few more of these units and found one that does not have the mSATA slot on the motherboard. I guess there are some versions of the motherboard without the mSATA slot. So, if that's important to you, probably should ask seller to verify before ordering. I've updated the OP.
If you can post which version of the motherboard that has and does not have the mSATA slot that would be great. TIA.
 

Mike W

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Did you ever test the M.2 slot with an ssd.
Any experience with the HP T510's. Got five of these just lying around. Cracked one open and was surprised to find a SATA port and a PCIe slot. Gonna Play with one of these.
 

BLinux

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Did you ever test the M.2 slot with an ssd.
Any experience with the HP T510's. Got five of these just lying around. Cracked one open and was surprised to find a SATA port and a PCIe slot. Gonna Play with one of these.
Don't know much about the T510.

The M.2 slot in the T620Plus are already occupied with a 16GB SSD, so that is what i've used in that slot and it seems to work fine, but I don't know how fast it is - high disk i/o isn't something I'm expecting out of these machines, but the OS does boot pretty fast.
 

Mike W

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Don't know much about the T510.

The M.2 slot in the T620Plus are already occupied with a 16GB SSD, so that is what i've used in that slot and it seems to work fine, but I don't know how fast it is - high disk i/o isn't something I'm expecting out of these machines, but the OS does boot pretty fast.

Thanks for the info. Found some info from a link earlier in the thread that helped me a little. Don't believe have have any need for these. Got enough projects honestly. Going to give them away on the sell/trade forum.
 

WANg

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Hi - have been following this thread with interest - several things I can/should point out that would be of interest to HP Thin client users/owners.

a) The t620/620 Plus Thin clients can be obtained fairly cheaply on eBay (I should know, I used to manage a bunch of GT7725s as part of my job)

b) The power brick used by the entire T-series thin clients are actually the same as the HP EliteBook series of notebook computers (the ones with the 90w adapters pre-packed) and their accessory docking stations - old 90w docking stations from the HP Elite series are not that difficult to get a hold of. The t-series thin client has a reputation for being powerful and quite power efficient which goes back to the t7720/gt7725s.

c) If you are not familiar with HP ThinPro (Debian or Ubuntu based), there is actually an VMWare evaluation disk image of ThinPro dating back to the ThinPro 3 period that you can play around with right here:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp49501-50000/sp49650.exe

Unpack the VM, get it running, switch to admin mode (password is root) and it should prompt you to setup the ThinPro OS - keep it a multi-protocol setup with the classic GUI. After the reboot switch to admin mode, and use ThinState to restore a later (stock/not VM only) image.
The images are all stored here:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/tcdebian/images/

- the one downside I saw from the 620 Plus is that the PCIe slot onboard is only an x4 (physically x16), so if you need to drop in a dualport 10GbE card, that's a no-no.

d) All t610s and 620s have the ability to take an M.2 based Fiber ethernet adapter (Allied Telesys AT27 or 29), both in SC and LC forms. The same can be said about the t630/t730 successors (not the same cards, though)

e) If you need more *oooomph*, I highly recommend the HP t730 thin client instead. While the t620/620 plus are GX420CA/GX415GA or GX217GA based (all AMD Jaguar based), the t730s are RX427BB (AMD Piledriver based). It also comes with 8 PCIe lanes in the PCIe slot, so installing a Chelsio T420 or SolarFlare 5-series card is very feasible. Current prices on eBay are about $200/unit, which is very competitive with most fully loaded Intel NUCs out there. I actually have a t730 serve as the hypervisor for my home lab (with a corresponding write-up. My only pet peeve is that the HP BIOS does not allow the IOMMU to be exposed in ESXi, so no VMDirectPath support as far as I can tell for now). I have no doubt that you should be able to do some serious packet filtering even on 10GbE line speeds, especially if you have something like SolarFlare's openOnload hardware based TCP offloading in a modern low latency tweaked Linux kernel.
 
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fohdeesha

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the one downside I saw from the 620 Plus is that the PCIe slot onboard is only an x4 (physically x16), so if you need to drop in a 10GbE card, that's a no-no.
x4 lanes of PCI-E 2.0 is 20gbps of full duplex bandwidth (500MB/s both up and down simultaneously per lane), so that's definitely more than enough for a 10gbE NIC (as long as it will physically fit in the slot). One of my desktops downstairs has a mellanox 10gbE card in an x4 slot, maxes out 10gbps both ways no problem
 

BLinux

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T730 with 8GB/32GB HP t730 Thin Pro (RX427BB 2.7 GHz - 8 GB RAM - 32 GB Flash Storage) | eBay

T730 with 4GB/16GB HP t730 ThinClient AMD RX-427BB 2.70GHz 4GB 16GB Flash Radeon R7 No OS Installed | eBay

They look better but if you're just doing a simple appliance saving cash is better.
The TDP on that CPU is higher than the GX-420CA, but considering how efficient the GX-420CA is (system idle at 6.9W even though CPU was 25W TDP), anyone know if the RX-427BB is as efficient when idle and perhaps just has a higher range to spin up when more compute is needed?
 

Patrick

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I just opened up my second T620 Plus. It came with Jamestown Rev A. The first was Rev B.

It also had a 100mbps Fiber card, but this time a PCIe x1 version.

Now the "scary" part. I opened up #2 and a spider came out with the body about the size of a dime. That was a bit shocking!