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

blackice8r said:
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..
Click to expand...

£29 for 2x4GB of DDR3 PC3 10666 CL8 Amazon marketplace seller, search for product B003OSTDPI.
The seller is legit, and the ram checks out 100% fine (I have two in my microserver atm)

Why do you want 250GB HDDs? 2TB drives are the sweet spot for £/GB at the moment. (not to mention GB/Watt)
Forget about the drive supplied with the machine, and fit it out with 2TB drives instead.
My suggestion would be WD20EARX Caviar Green, as at the moment you can get 2 for £105.59 on Scan's daily deal.

As for RAID5, I was under the impression the microserver's CPU wasn't quite fast enough to keep up - so can end up bottlenecking your write throughput.
Can anyone confirm this to be the case?
 
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TehJumpingJawa said:
£29 for 2x4GB of DDR3 PC3 10666 CL8 COMPETITOR. The seller is legit, and the ram checks out 100% fine (I have two in my microserver atm)

Why do you want 250GB HDDs? 2TB drives are the sweet spot for £/GB at the moment.
Forget about the drive supplied with the machine, and fit it out with 2TB drives instead. My suggestion would be WD20EARX Caviar Green, as at the moment you can get 2 for £105.59 on Scan's daily deal.

As for RAID5, I was under the impression the microserver's CPU wasn't quite fast enough to keep up - so can end up bottlenecking your write throughput.
Click to expand...

I'd read the rules, I see you haven't been a member long!?
 
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TehJumpingJawa said:
£29 for 2x4GB of DDR3 PC3 10666 CL8 Amazon marketplace seller, search for product B003OSTDPI.
The seller is legit, and the ram checks out 100% fine (I have two in my microserver atm)

Why do you want 250GB HDDs? 2TB drives are the sweet spot for £/GB at the moment. (not to mention GB/Watt)
Forget about the drive supplied with the machine, and fit it out with 2TB drives instead.
My suggestion would be WD20EARX Caviar Green, as at the moment you can get 2 for £105.59 on Scan's daily deal.

As for RAID5, I was under the impression the microserver's CPU wasn't quite fast enough to keep up - so can end up bottlenecking your write throughput.
Can anyone confirm this to be the case?
Click to expand...


I don't want to spend to much on this project and storage is just one of the aims.
I'd rather have less space, with redundancy, than 1 big HDD that can go puff...and my data with it

I got 1TB on my PC and I can stick more disks in, but there is no redundancy...I'd like the microserver to have some

Cheers for the tip on the RAM, tempting...


And yes...anyone knows anything about RAID10 or 5? is that going to create a bottleneck because of the CPU?
 
blackice8r said:
110£ (after cash back) for Hp N36L Microserver P/N: 633724-421 (

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
Click to expand...

1) Would appreciate an email with the place you can buy at £110. I can't find it!

2) Why, why, why do people feel the urge to run ESXi on this? Every single application I have seen suggested can as easily run under a single OS for one less thing to go wrong.

I'm sure its me but I cannot see the point of running several VMs on this machine. Someone put me right (in laymans English!)?
 
Methanoid said:
2) Why, why, why do people feel the urge to run ESXi on this? Every single application I have seen suggested can as easily run under a single OS for one less thing to go wrong.

I'm sure its me but I cannot see the point of running several VMs on this machine. Someone put me right (in laymans English!)?
Click to expand...


The question is WHY NOT?

It would be a waste to run this nice piece of hardware as a NAS box 24/7 for just 2 users (that's my case, me and my wife).

I would also like a VPN and I would like to learn more about ESX and firewalls in general. I manage lots of virtual servers but they haven't been installed and set-up by me, why not experiment/learn?

Why buy a 400-600£ firewall when you can get a software firewall?

ESXi 4.0.1 has already been tested and runs fine on this microserver.

This is a box with a dual core CPU and will have 8GB of RAM, my initial plan was ESXi on a single core 1.7GHz Intel Centrino that would run something like FreeNas and a software firewall. You think this is crazy? It's already been done on very old machines Ex: P4 2Ghz with 2GB of RAM - the guy was running 4 VMs on it just fine.
Of course not everything on the internet is true...but also don't mistake a 1-3 ppl usage to corporate usage....
I would bet my money that the story is true.


Why ESXi? Because it works! (Hyper-V is not bad either) Because it's the future. Virtual machines are easy to move around,duplicate, backup etc
Now days the hardware is very powerful, why not use that to run several things on the same hardware?


The price for the box is NOT 110£, I saw it for 220£ on the manufacturer's web site, and a few other places, just simply google the part nr: 633724-421


HP is running a cash back deal until the end of this month.
110£ cash back if you buy the N36l
http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/campaign/proliantmicroserver/offer.html
 
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tbz_ck said:
ESXi 5 runs fine on my Microserver. I'd use that over 4.1 to be honest.
Click to expand...

cheers tbz_ck , I'll try it.

I have a few questions..

What do you run on ESXi? How many VMs ? How do they run?

Do you run ESXi off a HDD or a flash drive? The VMs are stored on the same flash drive/HDD or they have to be stored on a different one?


Should I buy the care pack for this server...?


Many thanks!
 
blackice8r said:
The question is WHY NOT?

The price for the box is NOT 110£, I saw it for 220£ on the manufacturer's web site, and a few other places, just simply google the part nr: 633724-421

HP is running a cash back deal until the end of this month.
110£ cash back if you buy the N36l
http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/campaign/proliantmicroserver/offer.html
Click to expand...

Ah but its £100 cashback and hence £120. I was just wondering if your mistake indicated that you'd found it at £210.

And I guess your ESXi argument is like the argument to climb Everest, "because it's there". Fair enough. I just wondered if I had missed some special need out. I can respect the need to "mess around" on machines ;)
 
I think I've seen it for 210£ on Friday somewhere, but again I could be wrong, I will send you the link for the 220.73 £ price, not sure if it includes delivery
keep an eye on hotukdeals.com - not a competitor guys so don't jump me:P ; also don't forget about quidco (a cash back voucher database) , it might save you a bit more
The cash back offer is until 30th and might get extended, if you wait there might be an offer for it somewhere , I will get it today or tomorrow , for me the offer is very good as it is.


Edit: how do I send you a message? never done it on this forum :)


I just got it for 228£ (about 4£ for the delivery and 3-4£ paypal's fee ), about 37£ for 8GB of ram, I'll get some hard drives tonight and I'm all set...
I found the care pack for 60 something, ordered but they called me back asking for IDs and stuff so I cancelled...I'll have a think about the care pack...

I've read mixed opinions, there might be a chance to claim 30£ back for the care pack, but it might not work if you bought the server from one company and the care pack from another...
 
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Just to add something to the ESX arguement. On my box I'm running a Windows server which handles DHCP, DNS, certificate services; then I have a ubuntu server to handle downloads and to act as my file server; then theres my voice server which I use to run IP phones on my network. I have also previously run a software firewall before moving to a hardware firewall instead.

There probably is no NEED to run ESX on this server, but its a nice to have and if your interested in playing around with some new technologies its a perfect place to do it. Its a horrible feeling to play around with something on a machine you use to do something important and then you realise you've broken it.
 
TheKnat said:
Just to add something to the ESX arguement. On my box I'm running a Windows server which handles DHCP, DNS, certificate services; then I have a ubuntu server to handle downloads and to act as my file server; then theres my voice server which I use to run IP phones on my network. I have also previously run a software firewall before moving to a hardware firewall instead.

There probably is no NEED to run ESX on this server, but its a nice to have and if your interested in playing around with some new technologies its a perfect place to do it. Its a horrible feeling to play around with something on a machine you use to do something important and then you realise you've broken it.
Click to expand...


spot on!!

turn VMs on and off, backup, have your main objective running while you test something else...that's virtualisation!!!
 
Can anyone tell me whether the onboard eSata port is recognised under ESXi?

I currently use eSata for backing up my Microserver to external HDD's and it runs quite happily at about 70MB/s. Having to move back to running backups at 20MB/s over USB would be painful.
 
Rudeboy said:
Can anyone tell me whether the onboard eSata port is recognised under ESXi?

I currently use eSata for backing up my Microserver to external HDD's and it runs quite happily at about 70MB/s. Having to move back to running backups at 20MB/s over USB would be painful.
Click to expand...

I can'nt imagine why it would'nt be at least with the modified bios as the esata uses the same controller as the 4 harddrives in the caddies and the bios picks up and drive attached to the esata exactly the same as if it was an internal drive.
 
Has anyone tried esxi-5 on this server with the onboard raid? Does it work properly now, or does it still see the seperate disks?
 
blackice8r said:
cheers tbz_ck , I'll try it.

I have a few questions..

What do you run on ESXi? How many VMs ? How do they run?

Do you run ESXi off a HDD or a flash drive? The VMs are stored on the same flash drive/HDD or they have to be stored on a different one?


Should I buy the care pack for this server...?


Many thanks!
Click to expand...

It varies. I have had 4 VM's running without issue Win 2008R2 DC, Win 7 client, WHS v1 and Elastix VoIP system. Now I have just WHS 2011 and SBS 2011 Essentials (which I am trying out for a project). Will add a couple of Win 7 clients to it too to test against SBS 2011 but that won't be for a week or so due to time constraints.

I run ESXi off the internal USB port on an 8GB Memory stick. The VM datastores are stored on the hard disks of the microserver. Best bit about ESXi on a USB stick is that you can plug it in elsewhere and clone it should your USB stick die.

Care pack is your choice. I didn't bother personally
 
Does anyone know if I would be able to get a low profile graphics card in this server and a low profile dual tuner tv card?

I am thinking of ditching my dead HTPC and using this as a media box/TV streamer/server all in one.
 
DJMK4 said:
Does anyone know if I would be able to get a low profile graphics card in this server and a low profile dual tuner tv card?

I am thinking of ditching my dead HTPC and using this as a media box/TV streamer/server all in one.
Click to expand...

it's been discussed on this thread but I guess it's getting to big to find info easily
I made a summary with all the info I needed:


HD 5450 512MB GDDR3 SILENT Low Profile PCI-Express Graphics Card
several ppl have it, tested , it fits and works fine - I would say go for this one

one or two ppl tried: GT430 , seems to work ok

Zotac ION 5574GTX - problems reported



I hope it helps.



Tuner - I wasn't interested about the tuner but there is info about it if you read trough the thread.
 
DJMK4 said:
Does anyone know if I would be able to get a low profile graphics card in this server and a low profile dual tuner tv card?

I am thinking of ditching my dead HTPC and using this as a media box/TV streamer/server all in one.
Click to expand...

I run an HD6450 & Tevii S470 in my Microserver. I know its not a dual tuner but as long as the tuner is PCI-e 1x and low profile you wont have a problem.
 
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