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

the-evaluator · 9 Mar 2017 at 08:45

Depending what you're using it for there may be no advantace to having an additional NIC.

In my Gen 8 I've got an Intel Quad port NIC which I uses for iSCSI traffic to my Synology NAS. If all the storage I was using were DAS then I wouldn't have bothered with the additional NIC.

Snapshot · 17 Mar 2017 at 08:52

Try pulling all the drives in the main cage then see if the one on the CD connector is detected.

sportq · 17 Mar 2017 at 10:23

I've got an odd problem with the B120i controller. I want to use an SSD on the 5th SATA port for the OS so planned to create RAID0 volumes for it and the 3.5" drives that will hold data. I have another Microserver with exactly this configure and it works well.

The problem, I can't get the SSA ACU interface to appear with the F5 key. I've tried through the .NET remote console and with a real USB keyboard. I see the notice that the B120i is detected, that there are 0 volumes configured, press F5, it says that the SSA ACU has been selected but it never appears, the system drops to PXE booting because there are no volumes.

This is so stupid and fustrating, anyone got a clue what going on?

BIOS is J06 11/09/2013 old?

sportq · 17 Mar 2017 at 14:39

Following up my post above., still no-go.

Updated to the latest BIOS and iLO, J06 11/02/2015.
Tried the Java Webstart client instead of .NET

Always the same, says SSA ACU has been selected and will start automatically, never does.

F9, F10 and F11 keys work perfectly.

Peter

kefan77 · 17 Mar 2017 at 19:04

Sorted now. Could not install OS on one of HDDs before i get hold of fdd to sata adapter in my gen8, so i can have os on ssd in port 5. when swapped 2tb for 750gb all works.

Oh Ed not again. · 18 Mar 2017 at 18:50

sportq said:
Following up my post above., still no-go.

Updated to the latest BIOS and iLO, J06 11/02/2015.
Tried the Java Webstart client instead of .NET

Always the same, says SSA ACU has been selected and will start automatically, never does.

F9, F10 and F11 keys work perfectly.

Peter

Hi Peter,

There's a limitation on the Gen8 where you can't select the 5th SATA port as a boot device when any of the drive bays are populated. It's annoying to say the least.

I ended up putting a 2GB MicroSD card on the board, installing GRUB on that then pointing the boot loader at the OS on the 5th SATA port. That way I could have the arrays as I wanted them with just data and not the OS.

Hope that helps.

Xez · 18 Mar 2017 at 20:58

randal said:
Hi Peter,

There's a limitation on the Gen8 where you can't select the 5th SATA port as a boot device when any of the drive bays are populated. It's annoying to say the least.

I ended up putting a 2GB MicroSD card on the board, installing GRUB on that then pointing the boot loader at the OS on the 5th SATA port. That way I could have the arrays as I wanted them with just data and not the OS.

Hope that helps.

By 5th port do you mean for the cd bay? I have an Intel SSD as my primary boot drive connected to this and it works fine. I have all four bays populated as well.

sportq · 20 Mar 2017 at 08:21

randal said:
Hi Peter,

There's a limitation on the Gen8 where you can't select the 5th SATA port as a boot device when any of the drive bays are populated. It's annoying to say the least.

I ended up putting a 2GB MicroSD card on the board, installing GRUB on that then pointing the boot loader at the OS on the 5th SATA port. That way I could have the arrays as I wanted them with just data and not the OS.

Hope that helps.

randal, my other Microserver has an SSD boot drive in the 5th/ODD SATA port and 4 x WD 3TB Reds so I know this should work as long as the B120i is in RAID mode, the drives were all configured with RAID0 so pass through to the OS for Linux LVM.

The other odd thing is that I can boot a virtual ISO, install Linux, it detects the disks even though they've never been configured but when I reboot it can't boot from them. This suggests the controller is NOT in RAID mode but AHCI mode.

Peter

nox_uk · 25 Mar 2017 at 12:26

i have to admit i just gave up with trying to boot off anything other than the primary array

that's with VMWare btw. I did get it booting off i think the onboard USB header but i was always a bit paranoid the stick was going to die on me!

Trig · 25 Mar 2017 at 16:26

VMWare will hardly touch the USB once its booted so I wouldnt worry about that..

nox_uk · 25 Mar 2017 at 16:45

yeah i know, it sits mostly in memory but it takes so little space on the disks anyway

sportq · 29 Mar 2017 at 08:22

Update on the problem getting the B120i configurator to appear after pressing F5 during BIOS.....

I downloaded the offline bootable ISO image that does the same thing. Attached it to the iLO virtual console and configured my SSD as the primary boot drive and 2 x 500GB SATA's, all RAID0. Installed Ubuntu onto the SSD and rebooted, works perfectly and the same as my other one. The iso I used was: ssaoffline-2.60-18.0.iso

F5 still doesn't work though.

Peter

nox_uk · 29 Mar 2017 at 08:49

i now rememeber why i gave up booting off a USB - because i needed to change the raid controller set up. This meant the fan speed of the system went up drastically and it became noisy. So i went back to just two raid 1 arrays...

Avathar77 · 5 Apr 2017 at 13:51

so is the Gen8 still a good buy after all these years? for general storage/media server use?

Trig · 5 Apr 2017 at 14:09

Yes, still a decent bit of kit, mine would still be active if it wasn't for the 16Gb RAM limit which I was hitting due to VM's..

Avathar77 · 5 Apr 2017 at 14:12

I am contently between Gen8/T20/custom build.

overcooled-xp · 5 Apr 2017 at 14:27

I have a Gen8 microserver and the fan is constantly running at 70% (luckily it's in my garage), but I need to get the fan running at normal levels again. Looking through the iLO it appears my 2.5" WD Black 500gb is being registered at 50c, but the drive itself is running around 23-25c. I need to replace this drive with another 2.5" drive. Which one do people recommend that will register correct temps, so the fan will run at lower levels? I have been reading about hacked firmware for ILO?

Trig · 5 Apr 2017 at 21:26

I've not seen any Gen8 hacked firmware/bios..

Might dig my Gen8 out tomorrow, had a P410/1Gb turn up today, want to run some tests between that and the P222/512, see what cache works in what etc..

nox_uk · 6 Apr 2017 at 08:31

I think the one you are thinking about wasn't hacked as such - It existed around 3 years ago to reduce the fan speed and it was just supplied unofficially by someone at HP. It then went rampant on another forum as a 'hacked firmware'. Shortly after HP updated the official firmware which was *almost* as quiet as the unofficial one but with other bug fixes so it kinda just disappeared.