Good Cheap Server - HP Proliant Microserver 4 BAY - OWNERS THREAD
- Thread starter dragonuk
- Start date
Arrgh been struggling for the past few days here. I decided to finally get round to adding in my 5th 2TB drive, and stuck a 90GB SSD in for ESXi to use for storing Images. Decided it would be easiest to blow away my old Ubuntu Server with ZFS setup and start fresh using Raw Device Mappings for the drives to try and eke out some more performance.
Been having big problems getting VM's to install, Illumos wouldn't, OpenIndiana would but performance wasn't really where I wanted and it doesn't (at least out of the box afaik) support VMXNet or the Paravirtual SCSI adaptor. Neither Ubuntu 11.04 or 12.04 server or desktop will install, failing at a variety of points in the install, usually during the grub install stage but it's gone at various points during the package install as well.
I've done memtests, verified the installation media, tried mounting media from a datastore rather than over the network, updated ESXI 5 to the latest build, tried EFI as well as BIOS, tried stripping away all the RDM drives. Am completely fed up with installation screens now.
Am just about ready to give up on ESXi entirely, copying Server 2012 onto a USB stick now to give that a whirl as I'm interested in the new storage pools feature and it should be better performance than I've managed to squeeze out of SAMBA thus far.
Been having big problems getting VM's to install, Illumos wouldn't, OpenIndiana would but performance wasn't really where I wanted and it doesn't (at least out of the box afaik) support VMXNet or the Paravirtual SCSI adaptor. Neither Ubuntu 11.04 or 12.04 server or desktop will install, failing at a variety of points in the install, usually during the grub install stage but it's gone at various points during the package install as well.
I've done memtests, verified the installation media, tried mounting media from a datastore rather than over the network, updated ESXI 5 to the latest build, tried EFI as well as BIOS, tried stripping away all the RDM drives. Am completely fed up with installation screens now.
Am just about ready to give up on ESXi entirely, copying Server 2012 onto a USB stick now to give that a whirl as I'm interested in the new storage pools feature and it should be better performance than I've managed to squeeze out of SAMBA thus far.
Associate
- Joined
- 19 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 1,082
What was your problem with ZFS performance? And how was it configured?
- Joined
- 14 Jun 2004
- Posts
- 17,513
- Location
- Newcastle U/T
6450 1Gb ordered finally.
just need a LP soundcard now
just need a LP soundcard now
Soldato
- Joined
- 7 Jul 2010
- Posts
- 3,581
6450 1Gb ordered finally.
just need a LP soundcard now
Why do you need a sound card?
Are you not going to use HDMI?
Seems like the mysql database that's running on mine is using so much memory that it's constantly swapping to the pagefile now.
Presumably the stuff in it is ECC registered? Do most people just swap it out with a pair of Non-ECC stuff?
Presumably the stuff in it is ECC registered? Do most people just swap it out with a pair of Non-ECC stuff?
Associate
- Joined
- 19 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 1,082
I added a single 4GB stick of ECC, so there's 6. I'll replace the 2GB with a 4GB when it needs it.
- Joined
- 14 Jun 2004
- Posts
- 17,513
- Location
- Newcastle U/T
My Amp doesnt have HDMI in
£20 on a soundcard or £150+ on an amp, easy decision
Just hope it can deal with the power needed, anyone else using both expansion ports?
My Amp doesnt have HDMI in
£20 on a soundcard or £150+ on an amp, easy decision
Just hope it can deal with the power needed, anyone else using both expansion ports?
I have a GPU and a NIC in it, using both slots. Obviously a NIC is not very taxing, power wise.
If the HDMI is going into a TV, can you not just plug headphones into the TV? This is what I currently do.
rp2000
With my headphone problem in the end i ordered a USB sound card for a couple of quid (Dynamode 7 Channel USB 2.0 Sound Card). Sounds fine for watching TV so very pleased Don't know what it would be like for anything more than headphones though. Just letting those know that might be interested
Don't know what it would be like for anything more than headphones though. Just letting those know that might be interested Is it possible to set one of these up to act as:
NAS and torrent box: be able to remotely choose torrents via android/ ios device and automatically download/ stop torrent and extract files. Be able to share these on the home network to my pc/ xbox 360/ android tablet/ ios devices.
AND a
HTPC: play those downloaded files without any problems in an easy to use format (GUI)?
Ive currently bought a WDTV Live whilst it was on offer at amazon for £66- has an easy to use interface and pretty much plug n play. I could just buy a WD My Book Live for another £100- it is possible to "hack" it to use transmission for torrenting and be able to remotely schedule them via android/ ios apps.
If im right I will still need to buy graphics card, keyboard, mouse and remote to get the N40L up to spec which would see my cost rise to around £170 + mouse keyboard and remote. Is it worth the extra? I would have the customisability to also browse/ use all iplayer/ 4oD/ itvplayer/ tvcatchup and even xbmc/ basic gaming?
ps. I know the cashback offer ends on the 31st so I will be waiting til aug (when they will likely renew the offer again)
NAS and torrent box: be able to remotely choose torrents via android/ ios device and automatically download/ stop torrent and extract files. Be able to share these on the home network to my pc/ xbox 360/ android tablet/ ios devices.
AND a
HTPC: play those downloaded files without any problems in an easy to use format (GUI)?
Ive currently bought a WDTV Live whilst it was on offer at amazon for £66- has an easy to use interface and pretty much plug n play. I could just buy a WD My Book Live for another £100- it is possible to "hack" it to use transmission for torrenting and be able to remotely schedule them via android/ ios apps.
If im right I will still need to buy graphics card, keyboard, mouse and remote to get the N40L up to spec which would see my cost rise to around £170 + mouse keyboard and remote. Is it worth the extra? I would have the customisability to also browse/ use all iplayer/ 4oD/ itvplayer/ tvcatchup and even xbmc/ basic gaming?
ps. I know the cashback offer ends on the 31st so I will be waiting til aug (when they will likely renew the offer again)
Probably do this quite easily, you would just need a few pieces of software and a bit of automation.
Plex/XBMC/Transdroid/Dropbox/Utorrent and some sort of unzipping software Windows File sharing.
If you already have PC's and mobile devices you could probably just RDP/VNC to control it normally without buying kbd/mouse. Obviously for gaming you would need these.
Far too much you want to do to give an exact step by step!!! But none of that should be impossible with the Microserver, indeed I do a lot of those things that you list on mine.
rp2000
ZFS performance was fine (5x2TB RDM mapped in RAIDZ1), it was CIFS/samba performance to my Windows 7 machines that was the problem (~30MB/s) I used to have it up around 70MB/s on ubuntu with zfs on linux(still not really where I wanted it, I get 110MB/s to my Win 2008 file server)
Have to say, very impressed with Server 2012 so far, Get 115MB/s Writes to the SSD and 95MB/s to a Parity VD on the Storage pool (CPU limited) Had almost 120MB/s on the reads too so I'm up against the limits of Gigabit (bring on thunderbolt!). Metro takes a little getting used to (Trying to find the Shutdown button required a Google!) but the OS feels very quick for such a low power machine. Stuff like Server Manager is a lot more responsive than my higher spec 2008 machine which is also on an SSD.
If It's stable I'm pretty sure I'll keep it and give up on ESXi/*nix VM with ZFS. We use Hyper-V at work so I'm pretty comfortable with using that for any VM's I want.
Anyone know what the deal is with migrating storage pools? I'm obviously going to have to upgrade to the full version of 2012 in a few months, If I can do so without losing data it makes my life easier.
Last edited:
ZFS performance was fine (5x2TB RDM mapped in RAIDZ1), it was CIFS/samba performance to my Windows 7 machines that was the problem (~30MB/s) I used to have it up around 70MB/s on ubuntu with zfs on linux(still not really where I wanted it, I get 110MB/s to my Win 2008 file server)
Have to say, very impressed with Server 2012 so far, Get 115MB/s Writes to the SSD and 95MB/s to a Parity VD on the Storage pool (CPU limited) Had almost 120MB/s on the reads too so I'm up against the limits of Gigabit (bring on thunderbolt!). Metro takes a little getting used to (Trying to find the Shutdown button required a Google!) but the OS feels very quick for such a low power machine. Stuff like Server Manager is a lot more responsive than my higher spec 2008 machine which is also on an SSD.
If It's stable I'm pretty sure I'll keep it and give up on ESXi/*nix VM with ZFS. We use Hyper-V at work so I'm pretty comfortable with using that for any VM's I want.
Anyone know what the deal is with migrating storage pools? I'm obviously going to have to upgrade to the full version of 2012 in a few months, If I can do so without losing data it makes my life easier.
Its a real shame that they don't do a WHS 2012 version. With storage pools it would be ideal
I've been having trouble installing the video drivers on to my microserver. Running 2008 R2 enterprise server but can't get it to use anything other than the standard VGA driver. The ones downloaded from the HP site say they install but it's still reporting standard video adapter.. anyone seen this?
Going to have to keep an eye on my 2012 install, It seems to like to power cycle after a short while (Maybe an hour) of copying files over the network. Seems stable otherwise so I'm wondering if it's the PSU struggling with 6 Drives + 8GB RAM + Network activity (Intel PCI-E card) + CPU stress from the parity calcs.
Will try and run some Something stressful like OCCT and an IOMeter to see if I can replicate it. Still got a fair amount of data to copy so for now I've just set my robocopy batch file to run on startup
Dedup is working nicely, getting about 15% savings which is as much as can be hoped for when dealing with mostly Audio and Video files.
Will try and run some Something stressful like OCCT and an IOMeter to see if I can replicate it. Still got a fair amount of data to copy so for now I've just set my robocopy batch file to run on startup
Dedup is working nicely, getting about 15% savings which is as much as can be hoped for when dealing with mostly Audio and Video files.
Morning all, I have trawled through the thread but cannot find what I am looking for. I have the most horendous transfer speeds on my server. Internally i.e. moving a file from on folder to another I get less than 1Mb/s and from accross the network I get just under 2. Is there any quick fixes I can apply to speed things up?
Great mines been shipped so it should be with me on monday. Was going to stick my nvidia GT430 in to give me a hdmi output but looks like it wont fit because of the heatsink on it, only reason I wanted hdmi is to connect it to my monitor but I guess I can do that via vga to set it up and then just remote access it from pc when needed. Can't decide what to do with regards to my hdd's currently got a little homeserver with 1 500gb and 2 x 2tb drives, the board Im using has no raid so I purchased drive bender which seems to work pretty well, just wondering wether I should do the same on the n40l? I might just ditch the 250gb drive and use the 500gb as the o/s drive but it leaves quite a bit wasted with whs2011, pool the 2 x 2tb drives with the option of adding another at a later date. Am I correct in thinking 2tb are the max it can address?