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

Nothing in there at the moment, I did have a P222 (supported) card which had the same issue. I've not tried that again since the firmware updates.

OS has been server 2012 R2 but is currently esxi for me to play with.
 
Battery! said:
To the guys with the Gen8s, are you getting major fan noise when using standard drives, i.e, not HP branded ones?
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4th week of using my Gen8, running Ubuntu Server 14.04.01 with two WD REDs. Tend to see fan speeds of between 7% and 13% with the BIOS set to ACHI (latest BIOS and firmware). The machine is louder than I would like, particularly the small delta fan in the PSU which has an irratating pitch. However the noise levels are something I've been able to live with.
 
skyripper said:
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.



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.
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Thank you for in depth answer, much appreciated. One question, and please excuse my ignorance, is this running FreeNAS as a VM or NAS4Free? Or letting the onboard HP RAID controller doing it and using those virtual disks as RDMs in vSphere?
 
I'm running NAS4FREE because I preferred the interface over FreeNAS. I think they both have the same sort of capabilities.

I use ordinary individual datastores inside ESXi, with the drives just as SATA drives - not using the onboard RAID. This means I can power off the server, pull them out the rig, and attach them to a completely different machine, and as long as it can read bare drives and has ESXi installed - I can boot my NAS back up.

If this was a production environment I'd be looking at real hardware raid, proper disk controllers supported by ESX etc. But I aint :)
 
Does anyone have a link to a modified bios that will work with the N36L?

I've set up a cache drive in unraid in the ODD slot and it's only copying at 11 MB/s, so it looks like I never did upgrade the bios before.
 
Just a heads up, as I know a few on here have lost/broken N40L/N54L keys in the past and needed to beg/borrow/buy replacements: there are some for sale on eBay:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-ProLia...79?pt=DE_Computing_Server&hash=item3a95dd795f

They work out a bit expensive at £11-ish including postage (they're sent from Germany), but they work fine: mine arrived in about 4 days.

Also a tip, if you're not bothered about security: It's possible to remove the top of the case without the key, so with a bit of masking tape the key can be stuck to the inside of the case where you can't lose it/snap it off in the lock like I managed to do :)
 
Hi guys

Thinking of installing windows 8 on my N54L as well as using the Hyper V console if i decide to run any VM's. I was just curious to know if windows 8 will install ok? I have been reading that 8.1 would require the modded bios to work but i though if i install windows 8 and then just upgrade to 8.1 via the store would that work?
 
Has anyone got a GT 210 installed in an N40L? or could anyone who has installed a gfx card think it would fit? I've recently upgraded my monitors which previously had my 2x N40Ls connected by VGA cables, my new monitors only have HDMI sockets spare so ill need cheap as chips HDMI low profile cards, the GT210 seems the cheapest I'm just not sure if it will fit.

Im running FreeNAS and Windows Home server, both being controlled remotely apart from when something serious goes wrong and ill need to have the option to have a screen plugged in.
 
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liamcrane said:
Hi guys

Thinking of installing windows 8 on my N54L as well as using the Hyper V console if i decide to run any VM's. I was just curious to know if windows 8 will install ok? I have been reading that 8.1 would require the modded bios to work but i though if i install windows 8 and then just upgrade to 8.1 via the store would that work?
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2012/Windows 8 should install fine as is and HP did release an official bios that allowed 2012 R2/Windows 8.1 to install successfully too.

As you mentioned there is also a modded bios available that will unlock a lot more features and settings
 
Timber said:
4th week of using my Gen8, running Ubuntu Server 14.04.01 with two WD REDs. Tend to see fan speeds of between 7% and 13% with the BIOS set to ACHI (latest BIOS and firmware). The machine is louder than I would like, particularly the small delta fan in the PSU which has an irratating pitch. However the noise levels are something I've been able to live with.
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On my Gen7 the PSU fan had a whine which disappeared over time.
 
Well my N54L has done something odd today, when I got home tonight I found that when I tried to access the network share it was empty. A quick bit of investigation and the Linux install couldn't detect any of the storage drives, but the OS drive is fine. The storage drives aren't even detected in the BIOS, so I'm not sure what is going on seeing as it was all fine last night.

Going to have to spend the weekend seeing if I can get it all working again, and to make sure it's not borked all my data.
 
Has anyone fitted an i5-3470 into their Gen8?

I have one knocking about that i might try. I will loose ECC support but I don't think its essential for a home media server anyway.
 
Just had a re shuffle with my N54L, decided to make it into a server/htpc so I can no look to sell off my old htpc in the MM. Put windows 8 on a 75gb drive and have 3 wd Reds for storage pooled with stablebit drive pool . Have a blu Ray player installed as well so can't use the top bay for a drive at the mo. Installed a 5450 gpu along with a TBS PCI tv tuner which seems to be working great.

Installed the plex server for streaming round to the devices in the house seems to provide 1080p with no issues. Also installed media portal so I can use the tv server to record to the pooled drives. Also have the hyper v feature enabled if I decide to run some vms in the future. Running 16gb of ram so over all a nice tidy working system :)
 
DIABLO said:
On my Gen7 the PSU fan had a whine which disappeared over time.
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It's not coil whine, or grinding but I suspect the pitch and tone of the noise - probably becuase it's a 40mm delta fan. My previous Ubuntu server was near-silent with a Noctua CPU fan on it and I am sensitive to noise.

The Gen8 is too noisy for a lounge but in my office I finding the noise bearable although I'd prefer if it was quieter.
 
Evilpaul said:
Well my N54L has done something odd today, when I got home tonight I found that when I tried to access the network share it was empty. A quick bit of investigation and the Linux install couldn't detect any of the storage drives, but the OS drive is fine. The storage drives aren't even detected in the BIOS, so I'm not sure what is going on seeing as it was all fine last night.

Going to have to spend the weekend seeing if I can get it all working again, and to make sure it's not borked all my data.
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Well, I've managed to find out what happened to my server but I've no idea why it happened.
Firstly the storage drives not being detected was a red herring as that was just down to me not fully re-inserting them during my testing.
Secondly it turns out that Linux threw a major wobbly, it failed in a write transaction and then continued to retry the write, which constantly failed, for about 12 hours. As such I lost all my data, which while a PITA was thankfully nothing that important.

I've reinstalled the whole server now so hopefully it won't play up again.
 
By the way, if anyone is after a cheap 4 port NIC for these I have 5 left in my for sale thread if you have access to the MM :) (see sig)

Cheers,

G

(mods, feel free to bin this post if I'm not allowed to mention the MM in here, just thought it would be a good place to let people know about this as I have the same NIC working flawwlessly in my N36L :) )
 
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