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

Slowly getting tempted to bite the bullet and get one today. I can plug in a external DVD drive, right? Work have said it's OK to have a copy of Server 2012 and all that.
 
Well happy with mine! Not finished setting it up properly (planning on using it as an RDGateway server too) But got an old mechanical boot drive and a WD Red 3TB for storage in it. Works great.

I was streaming lossless music to my PC, 1080p film to my laptop and copying music to my phone over the network the other day, all while working on it via RDP, and it didn't even blink.
 
I've got an N54L sitting here that I haven't had the time to do anything with - would it be worth selling and upgrading to the Gen 8 microserver whilst they are on offer? I was looking to use the N54L as a fileserver, but might play around with pfsense / streaming video etc.
 
Just streaming video or on the fly transcoding too?

If transcoding, you might find it worthwhile as the cpu in the gen8 is quite a bit quicker, however if just file server / simple streaming, then I don't think there is much point.

Other thing worth considering though, I think the n54l only has one network port, whereas the gen8 has two... Which may benefit you with pfsense
 
To claim the cashback, do you have to post out the form, or can it be emailed?

I'm sure I read something here about people emailing in their claims, but can't see any information from HP, or anything recent in this thread.
 
div0 said:
To claim the cashback, do you have to post out the form, or can it be emailed?

I'm sure I read something here about people emailing in their claims, but can't see any information from HP, or anything recent in this thread.
Click to expand...

You can email it to them :)
 
Have 4x 6TB WD Reds arriving tomorrow for one of the Gen8s... I was just looking around at what OS to use.

I was going to just use Win7 on a spare 50GB SSD I have that hasn't been doing much for a while.

I already have my own home server with i5 4570 & 32GB ram... so no need for any virtualisation or really anything other than storage duties for these Gen8s.

So I was thinking about things like FreeNAS and XPEnology... but found a couple of caveats that are holding me back from these last two.

XPEnology:

- Requires the USB stick to be in the system when you boot (no surprise there really)
- If you leave the USB stick in the system, then the hard drives won't spin down when they're not in use? (This "issue" seems to still be valid as of 30th March)

FreeNAS:

- Demands a minimum hardware requirement of 8GB RAM
- Seriously? How could they encode something so terribly that it REQUIRES a minimum of 8GB RAM? Even windows server will run on under 2GB.

I only have the 2GB sticks for these machines and no plans to expand as there's really no need in my opinion.

I have Windows 7 running on one of them & Windows 2012 R2 on the other... been testing them while I've been waiting for HDDs to arrive & both of those flabby Microsoft OSes are working fine on 2GB ;)

Any tips?

I could go with CentOS I know... or another standard linus distribution... but I'd rather not as I've had trouble in the past and I find Windows raid much easier to rebuild (even if it's slow while in operation).
 
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Pretty sure the spin down problem was fixed in xpenology ages ago.

I've not been using it long, but I'm sure I'd read that when I was reading up on it.
 
That would be good. I saw a post from 30th March this year on their forum that suggested it had not been resolved...

I'd like to use the internal USB port if possible & I have a handful of 4GB USB2 usb drives laying around not doing much :)

But if there is that spin-down trouble... then I would rather go with something else.
 
crinkleshoes said:
FreeNAS:

- Demands a minimum hardware requirement of 8GB RAM
- Seriously? How could they encode something so terribly that it REQUIRES a minimum of 8GB RAM? Even windows server will run on under 2GB.
Click to expand...

The ZFS file system requires the RAM, FreeNAS itself is based on FreeBSD. The ZFS rule of thumb is minimum 8GB, preferably 1Gb per 1TB of disk space. ZFS is seriously clever stuff and the data integrity features are fantastic.

Use a disk format other than ZFS and you'll be fine on 2GB. Unsure if that's still an option with the current builds.

I'm getting by fine with 12TB (4x3TB drives) in ZFS and 8GB RAM in an N40L at the moment. Performance isn't noticeably worse than the 4TB/8GB it ran previously.
 
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Fair enough... think I'll leave it though... I don't fancy investing in the RAM... for my needs, I could happily run the disks in Win7 (shock! horror! hehe)

I'll give XPEnology a try out first though... happy with my 2x DS214j
 
Does anyone have a N54L running ESXi and a working Windows 2012 R2 VM on it? Mine reboots with this error.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2039596

I can't find any option in the BIOS to change though. On my N36L I have managed to install Windows 2012 R2 fine on the bare metal with the latest BIOS update (2013.10.01). The same BIOS has been installed on the N54L. Since it installs on bare metal on the other server I suspect something needs changing in ESXi?
 
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I was running Server 2012 on ESXi 5.5 on a N54L without issue. But now I am running Server 2012 R2 on ESXi 6.0 on a Gen 8. So not an exact match I'm afraid.

Are you using the custom HP image or the standard VMware one? I can only suggest that you try with the HP one (with the latest updates) if you haven't already.
 
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