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

Avathar77 said:
Well I got the HD6450 and installed it!
It was a bit of a pain to get the motherboard tray in after the GPU installation, but after bit of a fiddle with it and bending a small metal part that was obstructing the GPU low profile bracket I managed to finally do it!

But now I have play back issues with XBMC! :(
Tried VLC and MPCHC and they are fine, it is just XBMC that is having an issue with!
When I play any kind of video file with xbmc it just gets stuck after 5 seconds!
ANy body had this issue before?
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Do you have a power meter?
 
hmm I tested it today morning when it was with out the card and I remember the power figure in the meter, so I will be able to have a look again tomorrow morning(when every one has gone form the house) and compare it.
 
I have the 6450 and I do not have playback issues in XBMC under Windows Home server 2011 64bit.... I was using the xbmc 11.0 beta2 which I need to upgrade and 12.3 drivers which again need updating to 12.4.

Wanted to ask a question, does anyone know if it is possible to boot windows home server 2011 from a usb stick rather than a hard drive through the sata? Thanks.
 
Hello All,

Forgive me for my slight ignorance, and laziness in not trawling through all 3885 posts in this thread, I'm slowly working my way from Post #1 forwards! However i've got a few immediate questions, that I was hoping someone might be able to answer fairly quickly, and give me some confidence to continue. I was literally about to hit the buy button on a Qnap 419 as I'm looking for a bit of get it setup and forget storage for the home network.

- Does a Proliant running FreeNas 7 really give you the chuck some drives in, setup and forget?
- What's overall cost like in comparison, does it need the ram upgrade etc
- I'm running a Macbook, and we've also got Windows machines on the Network, would a WHS2011 solution be appropriate instead of Freenas?
- I liked the idea of hotswapping extra space in, whilst I know I won't get hotswap, can I easily expand the array without data loss?

Thanks very much, I hope to contribute to this mighty thread should I get a proliant!

- Ross
 
Can only answer your 2nd question but the RAM upgrade from above 2GB definitely gave myself and a workmate a noticeable speed boost on our N40L's....
Mine has gone to 8GB and his to 4GB as he bought my spare 2GB stick.
 
"After extensive tests by our technicians your unit was found to be faulty, a replacement is being shipped to you."

I knew I wasnt going mad with that poxy cable!
 
Anybody know if this memory is compatable with microserver thanks Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel Kit
 
I need a second opion +suggestions please.

My Current Setup:

HP Microserver N36L + 8GB RAM + 2 x 2TB HDD (RAID 0), 80GB SSD (Windows 2008 R2)
This runs SABnzbd, SickBeard, CouchPotato, Plex Media Server (iPad Streaming). PS3 Media Server, Windows Shares, ExtremeZ-IP (Time Machine Backups), FingerPrint (AirPrint), Dropbox (PDF to iPad)

Has been working pretty well however I need more storage, some form of redundancy and expand my storage easily without having to go through the hassle of moving around exsisting files.

I’ve spent countless weeks going through all the various NAS software offerings, FreeNas, Openfiler, OpenMediaVault, Nexentastor, Greyhole, Debian (Software RAID) to name just a few.

Until I came across unRAID which ticks all the boxes for me, allows me to expand the array, use harddrives of various sizes and perfect for media files storage.

The issue I have is do I run one machine, (N36L) which does all of the above or do I deploy two HP Microsevers, one for storage and the other to handle all the apps? I have tried SABnzbd on unRAID and because it’s written in Python the performance isn’t brilliant in comparsion to my Windows machine ~7mb/sec downloads vs ~11mb/sec.

I’m stuck because I could probably run all those bits of software on my MBP without needing an additional machine however maybe I need an *always on* machine.

I also have a 50” telly which connects to PMS so I could possibly get one of those nano machines (Foxconn Nettop- nT-A3500) and have XMBC running with those apps in the backgroud, idle when watching movies etc.

Sorry for the long post everyone :D

Thanks for all your help
 
Sell your HP and buy a decent all-in-one ESXi box. As good as the HP is, there is only so much power and the lack of vt-d makes it difficult to run multiple OS's
 
dLockers said:
Sell your HP and buy a decent all-in-one ESXi box. As good as the HP is, there is only so much power and the lack of vt-d makes it difficult to run multiple OS's
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You can easily run multiple OS's in ESXi. I have run up to 4 simultaneously. OK, you don't get stellar performance running 4 OS's on an N36L but running 2 should be no problem at all with or without VT-d.
 
tbz_ck said:
You can easily run multiple OS's in ESXi. I have run up to 4 simultaneously. OK, you don't get stellar performance running 4 OS's on an N36L but running 2 should be no problem at all with or without VT-d.
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Disk transfer rate is going to plumit without vt-d and makes a file server painful when copying stuff to it.

This is only if you wanted to spend upwards of £400 quid though. I did mine for around that, minus hard drives.
 
dLockers said:
Disk transfer rate is going to plumit without vt-d and makes a file server painful when copying stuff to it.

This is only if you wanted to spend upwards of £400 quid though. I did mine for around that, minus hard drives.
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It's not too bad, I've just benched mine, and I get 85MB/s reads, 75MB/s sustained writes, over a gigabit network to an Ubuntu VM sharing a RAIDZ based pool with Samba.

Could be better (I get 110MB/s to and from my main file server) but hardly painful.
 
Storage prices are dropping (slowly) and I need to add more space to my machine soon.

Has anyone here (using Windows 7/2008R2 x64) without RAID etc got a 3TB or 4TB disk installed?

google results seem mixed on whether 4TB drives would work in the microserver, 3TB should do, but I would like some confirmation from fellow OcUK microserver owners.

(I am not planning to buy a 4TB anytime soon, but if it works I will hold out and wait, if not will plan on getting 3TB drives, once the prices drop a little bit more).


rp2000
 
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Zarf said:
Apart from that minor annoyance, It's nice, I actually changed OS from Solaris to Ubuntu Server with ZFS (was chasing better SMB speeds) and I was able to import my old pool with all data intact with a simple one line command (something like 'ZFS import')
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Interesting, do you know if you can run ubuntu from a USB drive? I'm currently using freenas and the SMB performance isn't great 70mb write, 45mb read...
 
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