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

roachyuk said:
So who is using the modded bios and is it ok to use without any problems....i need to use ahci on a drive above the drive bays thanks
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I use it, it's fine.

@anyone - I picked myself up a dual port Intel nic, without realising the PCI plate is twice as long as the HP microserver holds. I considered bending it, but decided I'd probably rather just get a replacement (there are screws there). Is possible to buy these, is so why can't my google fu find them? :p
 
Presently running ubuntu server and xbmc on this beauty with 4gb ram

All going great but fancy a change

Have the OS on the 250gb drive and the 2 2x2tb coolspins as storage

Its not raided up or anything like that as never really played around with raid at all

Anyway - thinking of upping the ram to 8gb and running vSphere Hypervisor off a usb drive - then hopefully still be able to run XBMC on ubuntu and also hoping to run WHS of some description as Ive never used that

Im about to go reading but if anybody can recommend a best way to do this would be great to have a head up
Thanks
 
Anyone running unRAID on an N40L? I am only getting write speeds over a gig network of about 30MB/s but read speeds are good.

Any tips?
 
Sorry for epic lack of thread searching, but have minimal internet time (hotel wifi) - do OCUK sell any suitable graphics card for the n40l? Can anyone link me? Thanks
 
tododo said:
Presently running ubuntu server and xbmc on this beauty with 4gb ram

All going great but fancy a change

Have the OS on the 250gb drive and the 2 2x2tb coolspins as storage

Its not raided up or anything like that as never really played around with raid at all

Anyway - thinking of upping the ram to 8gb and running vSphere Hypervisor off a usb drive - then hopefully still be able to run XBMC on ubuntu and also hoping to run WHS of some description as Ive never used that

Im about to go reading but if anybody can recommend a best way to do this would be great to have a head up
Thanks
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Are you not wanting to destroy any data in your conversion to virtualised?
 
tbz_ck said:
Are you not wanting to destroy any data in your conversion to virtualised?
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Dont really mind - Ive got the important stuff backed up on an external drive

Just fancy having a dabble of this vsphere tbh - not sure if there will be a big performance hit though??
 
tododo said:
Dont really mind - Ive got the important stuff backed up on an external drive

Just fancy having a dabble of this vsphere tbh - not sure if there will be a big performance hit though??
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This is what I did:

Power off your Microserver
Download vSphere Hypervisor free (Esxi5) iso and burn it to CD. Download the vSphere Client (you will need this on a separate PC)
Get a 4GB or 8GB USB Stick and stick it in the Internal port of the microserver.
Using an external DVD drive boot up from the vSphere CD and install vSphere to the internal USB stick (here you choose whether you want static or dynamic IP, the password for the root user, whether you enable SSH or not etc)

Reboot after installation and make a note of the IP address of the vSphere installation.

Using vSphere Client on another PC log into you vSphere installation with the
username root and the password you set above.

Now you need to create your storage. There are two parts to this, the datastore and the virtual disks. The easiest way is to configure a datastore for each of your physical disks to its maximum size. So in your case you would create 1 datastore for the 250GB disk at maximum size, and 1 each for the 2TB disks at maximum size.

Once you have done this you can create your first virtual machine.

I used the 250GB disk for the OS partitions of the machines I created, and the other disks as storage.

In your case you will need 1x virtual disk of 170GB for WHS 2011 (it will partition it as a C and D drive automatically) and the rest for your Ubuntu install.

At this stage don't bother about creating Virtual disks for the storage. Do that AFTER you have installed the OS drives. Once WHS is installed, you will need 2 new virtual disks. One for your storage and one as a target for the WHS server backup.

That's it in a nutshell.

Shout if you get stuck
 
If you don't have an external DVD drive then you can make a second bootable USB stick with the ISO image burned to it I guess ! :)
 
Excellent - thanks for the guide and the time you took to write that up

How is performance btw

Planning on getting another 4gb stick so 8gb total
 
I've read through your posts tbz ck, with interest, but outside of a student at uni doing course work, does this Hypervisor stuff have any practical advantages for guys running the Micro as a simple home server. Which at the end of the day ...........that is what it is?

Not drubbing what your doing just curious :)
 
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Essexraptor said:
I've read through your posts tbz ck, with interest, but outside of a student at uni doing course work, does this Hypervisor stuff have any practical advantages for guys running the Micro as a simple home server. Which at the end of the day ...........that is what it is?

Not drubbing what your doing just curious :)
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The main benefit of a hypervisor is to enable you to run multiple OSes simultaneously on the same hardware. That's the bottom line.

Since I am an IT Consultant/MSP the Microserver forms part of my test lab for developing/testing solutions that I would deploy at a customer's site.

If all you intend to run is WHS 2011 on it then there is no need to run a hypervisor etc.

On mine at the moment I have WHS 2011, Windows 8 Client, SBS Essentials 2011, and an Ubuntu client running Ubiquiti Unifi controller :) Not all of them are running at the same time at the moment.

Without virtualisation I would need a separate box for each of those OS'es.

The other benefit for me is that once I have tested/proved a potential solution, I can document it so that when I come to do it at a customer site I'm likely to do it right first time. Massive benefit for me as a one-man band :)
 
Not sure if anyone has this sort of problem?

I have a N40 with 8gb Ramm running ESXI.

I have a VM of WHS2011 for backups and file storage etc.

I have manually set my nic in vmware to be gig but I seem to only get around 10mb/s with when transferring files to/from my PC etc.

The network is all Gigabit (N40L ----- VM SuperHub ----- Computer)
 
olibb said:
Not sure if anyone has this sort of problem?

I have a N40 with 8gb Ramm running ESXI.

I have a VM of WHS2011 for backups and file storage etc.

I have manually set my nic in vmware to be gig but I seem to only get around 10mb/s with when transferring files to/from my PC etc.

The network is all Gigabit (N40L ----- VM SuperHub ----- Computer)
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The N40 doesn't have VT-d, so your limited by ESXi raw disk mapping.
 
I have a similar problem just running Ubuntu Server

Getting about 10-20mb/sec when writing to the drives
Recently upgraded to a gigabit router (asus rt-n66u) - so getting faster transfers on wireless at the moment - the house was CAT6 wired when I moved in 5 years ago and any switches are unmanaged gigabit

Havent had time yet to figure it out yet - have a 10/100 card in all laptops so I know thats an issue but also have a gigabit mini express card that fits into the laptop but every time I enable gigabit on that connection is lost

Have a bit of tinkering to do somewhere or just try another laptop with gigabit ethernet
 
tododo said:
So thats the performance hit when using vsphere then - no way around this I guess
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Nah, nothing to do with VT-d, I have more overheads than you (running software parity on VMFS Datastores, served up from an Ubuntu Server VM with Samba) And I still get ~80MB/s over gigabit.

Find out if the connection between the switch and the Microserver is running at gigabit speeds, as well as the connection to your PC. You might also want to take the "Super"hub out of the equation , set static IP's and use a crossover cable direct to your PC.

Which network adaptors are you using? I find VMXNET 3 to work well.
 
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