Good Cheap Server - HP Proliant Microserver 4 BAY - OWNERS THREAD

DIABLO said:
The microserver can be picky about cables, my first cable would'nt work and drive was'nt picked up at all. I hav'nt tried booting of a single drive connected to the esata but one of the drives belonging to the raid 1 array that windows is installed on is connected to the esata and it boots and runs fine I am running the modified bios though. Your only real options are to install windows on a 6th drive, install on the raid array if that's possible with flex raid or run an OS that's capable being run from a USB stick.
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Thanks for the reply.

Just to clarify, when working should the eSATA HDD be listed in the bios and/or POST screen?

Oh and what's the most recent version of the modified bios?
I guess there isn't a modified version of the very latest official release? 2011.07.29 (A)
I've heard conflicting reports of whether the latest version even needs to be modded?
 
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I've not seen screenshots of the latest BIOS, but, from reading the release notes, it doesn't appear that HP have done anything regarding AHCI mode, etc. It would be good if someone could test this, though! (I don't have time at the moment.) I would feel more happy running the latest official BIOS. :)
 
Someone contacted HP (can't remember which forum, ocuk, ocau, hukd, avforums, hardforum etc) about putting the feature in an official BIOS and they replied stating they wouldn't be as it's designed for an ODD so meant to operate at ATA
 
Ah, thanks for the info. Yeah, I thought they hadn't done it. Kinda lame, as I suspect the fifth (and, to a lesser extent, sixth) ports are used for hard drives at least as frequently as they are for ODDs.
 
Definitely

But the HP never intended that nor half of the other crazy stuff folk have done

Rerouting power cables to fit 2.5 or 3.5 drives in gap below ODD

Installing anywhere between 5-9 3.5 hds and if 2.5s i think the max is something like 12
 
Here's pics of the 4 drives in the ODD bay

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=11585.msg117706#msg117706

Here's a pic of the dremmel work to fit a 3.5 below the ODD
http://www.tenniswood.co.uk/technology/windows-home-server/australia-hp-microserver-owner-mods-case-to-support-up-to-19tbs-internally/
Originally from this thread I think

There's 2.5 inch drive bays that fit in 5.25 that take 6 x 2.5. But I don't think they take 1Tb 2.5 drives at they're 12mm instead of 9mm.

Then you can fit another 2 x 2.5 drives on top of the ODD below the top case. So that's 6 x 2.5 in ODD + 2 x 2.5 above and the backplane 4 x 3.5.

And as Al Vallario says there's loads of posts and pics of the noiseblocker swing (I think it is) that puts 2 x 3.5 HDs in the ODD slot
 
just set my server up with WHS2011 and for some reason the network speed will only let me select 100MB? WTF.....the device manager shows GB adaptor and it's plugged into a GB switch but windows won't let me even see the option for GB.

have i missed something?
 
TehJumpingJawa said:
...
Just to clarify, do eSATA HDDs appear in the bios and/or POST screens?
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Bump; really need an answer to this as i've still not managed to get my 2.5" HDD to be recognised when connected via the eSATA port.

Even Windows setup (run from a usb stick) doesn't recognise the drive when it's connected through the eSATA port.

It's definitely not a problem with the drive, as it works fine when connected through the ODD SATA port.

Incidentally I'm now running the modded firmware (041_AHCI).
 
It's all about the esata to sata cable. The server is INCREDIBLY picky on the cable. Look back through the thread and buy the exact one people have said they've definitely experienced working. I'm pretty sure it appears in the bios if it likes your cable.
 
TehJumpingJawa said:
Bump; really need an answer to this as i've still not managed to get my 2.5" HDD to be recognised when connected via the eSATA port.

Even Windows setup (run from a usb stick) doesn't recognise the drive when it's connected through the eSATA port.

It's definitely not a problem with the drive, as it works fine when connected through the ODD SATA port.

Incidentally I'm now running the modded firmware (041_AHCI).
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Yes it does show up on the post screen, just like a normal harddrive, you need another esata to sata cable because as said the microserver is picky about which ones it will work with and your problem is common.
 
Cheers.

Is it ebay item 110654586577 (not allowed to direct link?) from tm-direct that others have had success using?(found documented here)
Or is it the massive blue one found here?

Tried searching this thread and came up with lots of posts relating to cables not working, but no links to cables that do work.

Incidentally, the cable I have currently is branded pluscom.
I actually have 5 of them (ordered 1, was sent 5! :D), but none of them work :(
 
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Hi guys,


I've spent most of my day today reading this thred (yes..page 1 - 79 :D)

The microserver is very tempting, specially now since my plans for my old laptop failed (the NIC is not supported by ESXi ).

I need your advice, please tell me if my plans for it are resonable:

ESXi of a 16Gb flash disk
FreeNas as VM - on the flash disk - for: storage, NZBd/torrents
Endian Community Firewall VM - stored on the 16GB flash disk for : software firewall, VPN, remote controll (I hope) - if you know more about this and it's not achievable please let me know

the 250gb HDD +2 more 250GB in RAID 5 done by FreeNas VM - is it possible?
So the FreeNas instance will be a VM, could it be used to create a RAID 5 with 3 250Gb HDDs?

Should I get a 4th HDD and install ESXi on it rather than the flash disk?

Btw, I will install 8GB of RAM as I hope to play with other VMs from time to time.


My storage necessities are not high 500GB+, I would like some redundancy and I don't want to spend a lot of money on this.
I would like to be able to connect to this box remotely (hence the software firewall) and mess about with linux and VMs.

Ideally I would get a SAS/RAID card and implement RAID 5, attach 4x 2TB HDDs but that would sum-up this project to 450£ roughly...

I want a microserver to connect to remotely, to download torrents for me, to use it as test lab, to store some and that's about it.


What do you say is this resonable?
 
it's reasonable. The microserver doesn't support pci-e passthrough so you fill each drive with a datastore in esxi and then attach the datastores as virtual drives on your freenas vm. I'm not sure if you can easily store any VM's on the same drive that ESXi is installed so you may need to use an extra flash drive, or reserve some space on each drive for storing VM's. Personally, i'd go to four 250GB drives and run the virtual drives in RAID10 - same read performance, better write performance, lower resource use and the data itself is less vulnerable.
 
Just to say, you don't HAVE to to fill each drive with a large datastore. You can use RDM mapping for the drives as per the instructions HERE.

Just to say, these aren't my instructions but ones I found when trawling the interwebs. I suppose the end result is the same, but it used to annoy me seeing full datastores in Vcenter :P
 
Zarf said:
it's reasonable. The microserver doesn't support pci-e passthrough so you fill each drive with a datastore in esxi and then attach the datastores as virtual drives on your freenas vm. I'm not sure if you can easily store any VM's on the same drive that ESXi is installed so you may need to use an extra flash drive, or reserve some space on each drive for storing VM's. Personally, i'd go to four 250GB drives and run the virtual drives in RAID10 - same read performance, better write performance, lower resource use and the data itself is less vulnerable.
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Many thanks for the reply Zarf
If I can't store the VMs on the same flsh drive as ESXi it's fine, I'll just get one more USB stick.
RAID10...tempting...but..isn't that a bit of overkill? I mean, it doesn't hurt to have redundancy , but RAID5 might do too no?


TheKnat said:
Just to say, you don't HAVE to to fill each drive with a large datastore. You can use RDM mapping for the drives as per the instructions HERE.

Just to say, these aren't my instructions but ones I found when trawling the interwebs. I suppose the end result is the same, but it used to annoy me seeing full datastores in Vcenter :P
Click to expand...

TheKnat you just answered one dilema for me!!! I couldn't picture how I'm going to get the drives to be recognised in FreeNas so I can do the ZFS. Doing a ZFS using datastores didn't sounded quite right to me, Raw Device Mappings sounds better.


I will probably get the cheap KVR1333D3N9K2/8G and some cheap hard drives.

The 250HDD that comes with the microserver is a 7200rpm one..I would have profered a 5400rpm I guess, people are saying they run coller aparently.

By going for software raid and smaller hard drives the cost of this project has gone down at about 240£ I'd say...
 
I wrote down my plan and I calculated the costs , I'm not sure if it helps anyone but it might give someone like myself (at the beginning of the road) an overall idea.


110£ (after cash back) for Hp N36L Microserver P/N: 633724-421 (http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/campaign/proliantmicroserver/offer.html)
More specs for the box can be found on the internet
It’s a basic box with a dual core AMD Athlon II Neo N36L / 1.3 GHz
It can take 4 HDD, but it can be “hacked” to take 5 even 6 HDDs

35£ for KVR1333D3N9K2/8G - 8gb of basic non ECC DDR3 ram

75£ for 3 x 250 Gb 7200rpm HDD (The box comes with a 250GB 7200 rpm Hdd )


Total = 220£


The set-up

ESXi 4.0.1 of a flash drive
FreeNas/Openfiler/UnRaid - haven’t decided yet which one – as a VM ; I plant to implement a software RAID10 (overkill) or a RAID5; Role: storage, NZBd/torrents, print server
Endian Community Firewall VM ; Role: software firewall, VPN /remote control

I could add 1-2 more VMs if they are not CPU intense.

Summary:
Cost: 220£
Roles: NAS, software firewall, test lab
Space: 500GB on RAID10 or 750GB on RAID5
Power consumption: 3 or 4£ a month if kept on 24/7

I can get higher storage if I decide to spend more on bigger disks, for now this is the minimum I can get away with for a decent configuration..
 
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