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

GDL · 17 Jan 2015 at 11:24

Ozymandias said:
Search for a "Power Connector 3.5 to SATA" and one for £1 should appear

Son of a.....

Thanks!

Hank_Marvin · 17 Jan 2015 at 16:10

anyone got a 5450 in their micro?

I get static (fuzz) sound when played through my onkyo 606, if I play via my Nvidia 660 on my pc to amp the static is almost gone, only heard slightly at high levels but on the 5450 it's too noticeable.

Wondering if I have a noisy 5450, or maybe they just aren't screened very well.

Audigex · 17 Jan 2015 at 20:59

I've had a 5450 (later swapped it to a 6450) and I've never noticed any static issues with either on my Onkyo 607 (or, for that matter Yamaha 667)

james.miller · 17 Jan 2015 at 21:01

Hank_Marvin said:
I get static (fuzz) sound when played through my onkyo 606, if I play via my Nvidia 660 on my pc to amp the static is almost gone,

via hdmi? faulty amp, shouldn't get any interference at all.

Nash · 18 Jan 2015 at 00:05

What are my storage options with this server? I have ESXi installed and was thinking about FreeNAS and then offering some of the FreeNAS drives back as an NFS partition to vSphere for a datastore but after thinking about it that's not going to work as the FreeNAS VM won't be able to see the hard drives in the first place as they won't go through the hypervisor.

I basically want something I can use RAID on for parity in case a drive dies and also so that I can use it as a shared datastore for the ESXi but also a network share for Plex, file storage etc.

Frozennova · 18 Jan 2015 at 08:32

Nash said:
What are my storage options with this server? I have ESXi installed and was thinking about FreeNAS and then offering some of the FreeNAS drives back as an NFS partition to vSphere for a datastore but after thinking about it that's not going to work as the FreeNAS VM won't be able to see the hard drives in the first place as they won't go through the hypervisor.

I basically want something I can use RAID on for parity in case a drive dies and also so that I can use it as a shared datastore for the ESXi but also a network share for Plex, file storage etc.

That simply won't work. If you are virtualise your virtual machine storage. Esxi needs to be able to find the data store on boot and it won't be able to as the FreeNAS vm won't have yet booted. You'd need a second machine acting as a SAN running something like FreeNAS to have the NFS share available to the Esxi host on boot

Hank_Marvin · 19 Jan 2015 at 13:54

james.miller said:
via hdmi? faulty amp, shouldn't get any interference at all.

don't think it is the amp because the pc goes into it too, plus sky hd, blu ray etc, not tweeter buzz, but with the 5450 there's buzz. I tried the 5450 in a different hdmi input on amp and swapped the cable but the buzz remains.

Last thing I could try I guess is the 5450 in my pc and then test.

james.miller · 19 Jan 2015 at 14:01

well, you said it happens with the 5450 in the server and a 660 in your pc. that's two different gpus from two different vendors in two different setups. The only comment factor is the amp, unless you're using the same faulty hdmi cable but you would expect to see issues with the picture before the audio breaks up if the cable was faulty.

Hank_Marvin · 19 Jan 2015 at 14:31

james.miller said:
well, you said it happens with the 5450 in the server and a 660 in your pc. that's two different gpus from two different vendors in two different setups. The only comment factor is the amp, unless you're using the same faulty hdmi cable but you would expect to see issues with the picture before the audio breaks up if the cable was faulty.

no the 660 is fine. tried different cables, video is fine.

It's just very annoying as you hear it in quieter scenes or if you sit nearer the speakers.

liamcrane · 19 Jan 2015 at 15:16

anyone use a pico psu in there micro server? Just curious to know what they are like noise wise compared to the standard psu

adamau5 · 19 Jan 2015 at 16:10

my n54l is going up for sale.

I have just bought a lenovo ts120. Xeon quadcore, server 2012 r2, and £150 cash back.. all for £375. So i reckon I'll get £80 for the licence on the bay. Maybe £100 for the n54l (with a bit of extra ram)

Could be a hell of a server for a £45 upgrade (and a lot of faff....)

skyripper · 19 Jan 2015 at 16:29

Nash said:
What are my storage options with this server? I have ESXi installed and was thinking about FreeNAS and then offering some of the FreeNAS drives back as an NFS partition to vSphere for a datastore but after thinking about it that's not going to work as the FreeNAS VM won't be able to see the hard drives in the first place as they won't go through the hypervisor.

Frozennova said:
That simply won't work. If you are virtualise your virtual machine storage. Esxi needs to be able to find the data store on boot and it won't be able to as the FreeNAS vm won't have yet booted. You'd need a second machine acting as a SAN running something like FreeNAS to have the NFS share available to the Esxi host on boot

Something I've considered doing.

Your ESXi normally would be running off a USB stick. Your NAS can run off drives installed into the server. I know you can mount an additional datastore in ESX using NFS. So if your NAS can be presenting as much or as little storage as you like as an NFS share in theory you can build VMs stored there.

Autobooting your VMs, you'd need to make sure the NAS VM is booted first and with sufficient delay before any of the other VMs.

Be aware if you lose your NAS, all your other VMs will go up in smoke too. But I did test taking the virtual disks, attaching them to a fresh install of ESX, installing NAS4FREE and it reimported my ZFS volumes without breaking a sweat.

I don't know if ESX would try and connect to the NFS mount beforehand. Maybe you could remount it after the NAS VM has booted - with a command-line or Cron job maybe.

Nash said:
I basically want something I can use RAID on for parity in case a drive dies and also so that I can use it as a shared datastore for the ESXi but also a network share for Plex, file storage etc.

As for the resilience / RAID options. I have ZFS running on my NAS. I just stick 3 plain Virtual Disks into the NAS, and let it do the redundancy.
When I wanted to upgrade the drives from 1TBs to 4TBs, I powered off the VM, added each one new disk, copied the Virtual Disk image across, and repeated until all three were done.

Editted the VM, adding and removing the Virtual disks / datastores as necessary. Each one was also extended once created on the new disks.
Took a bit of faffing about, but the NAS moved across without knowing the hardware had changed.

A few ZFS commands later, and it then set about resizing the array to use the extra disk space. So you could have RAID equivalent redundancy the same way.

Frozennova · 19 Jan 2015 at 17:26

AFAIK it doesn't work like that.

During the ESXI bootup sequence it looks for your datastore NFS/ISCSI/SAMBA mount point, if it can't find it then it times out and doesn't reattempt to connect to it

GDL · 20 Jan 2015 at 20:10

Well, my xeon was DOA and returned, so I liberated an old CPU from work... A little extra grunt never hurt anyone now did it.

Battery! · 20 Jan 2015 at 23:22

To the guys with the Gen8s, are you getting major fan noise when using standard drives, i.e, not HP branded ones?

nutcase · 21 Jan 2015 at 08:53

Ozymandias · 21 Jan 2015 at 10:21

nutcase_1uk said:
Yes

I'm not

Are you using the latest ILO firmware? The earlier version of the ILO firmware had problems reading the temperature of non HP drives and hence ran the fan at a higher speed than needed.

beavis · 21 Jan 2015 at 10:22

No, I'm using AHCI with the increased cooling profile.

Nutcase, what BIOS are you using and what fan speeds are reported in iLO?

Ozymandias · 21 Jan 2015 at 10:28

AHCI with the fan at 11% (as reported by ILO) with the latest ILO firmware here.

nutcase · 21 Jan 2015 at 13:55

Ozymandias said:
I'm not

Are you using the latest ILO firmware? The earlier version of the ILO firmware had problems reading the temperature of non HP drives and hence ran the fan at a higher speed than needed.

2.03

One of their solutions architects had a look for me and had 3 suggestions, 1 official, 2 not.

1) Use HP drives
2) Disconnect the fan, put a variable resistor in, connect to power supply and set desired speed.
3) Use an AquaComputer Aquareo fan controller

My fan sits at 70%

Drives are in RAID 10 using the built in B120i

All firmwares are the latest.