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

agent_paul said:
Cheers Kimbie,

I managed to find it for £180 (with 160Gig HD) from a well known retailer but it doesn't mention the cashback offer, while on the same site there's the same product but with a 250Gig HD that does mention it.
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The 160Gb was the old model that was replaced with the 250Gb one. If you look at the cash back offer you need the item that has the part number of 633724-421 this is the number that needs to show on your invoice.

http://h41112.www4.hp.com/promo/pro...=ex_r135_uk/en/smb/tsg/go_proliantmicroserver

Kimbie
 
ok - quick update on my setup as may help someone.

got a bay converter to use hdd in the top bay.

2 x Windows 2008 r2 64bit - on some 80gb sata drives. These are mirrored using O&O Discimage server edition. Tested it, and if I pull one of them, the other one will boot it fine.

3 x 500gb drives (as I have them spare)

Installed:
OS
Flexraid and setup
Juice - podcast downloader
transmission-qt / utorrent (using transmission currently)
MS security suite for AV
cgywin - ssh, rsync running on it for my linux backups.
Granola to reduce power.
Virtualbox by Sun to run virtual images

Power settings set to low performance and drive spin down set to 10mins.

Power - approx 29watts

Well pleased
 
Hi guys, I've now acquired 4Gb ram and 4x2TB Seagate Green drives (ST2000DL003) to whack into this and I'm looking for advice on the best way of handling them. The server is going to be used as a home file server and used for streaming media over my network (photos, videos, music).

I'll probably be streaming mkv and I'd have really ideally liked RAID5 (mostly to attain 6TB of usable space), but the cost of hardware cards are definitely prohibitive for my uses, so my only option is software raid5 and setting it up through server2k8 R2 standard or just using onboard fakeraid 1 and sucking it up with 4TB max usable. What transfer speeds can I expect between the two raid options? Or should I maybe even forget about RAID and use jbod or dynamic disks instead? I'm really not sure what to do.

I could probably sync all my precious photo's off-site with dropbox, but not a whole lot else really, music I'll have in 2 places, but video will be the bugger, I'll likely only have that in the one place, but at the end of the day, the majority of it will be replaceable.

What to do chaps?
 
AbsenceJam said:
I've ordered one of these and an extra 2GB RAM.

What are the thoughts on Windows 7 vs. Server 2008 R2? Any particular reasons to go with one or the other?
Using drives with existing data on them else I'd go opensource with Z-RAID or mdadm.
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It depends what you want.
I went for Server R2 and it was so bad compatibilty wise i ditched it for Windows 7. But im going to have to reinstall it as i accidently installed 64bit and its eating to much memory.

I thought once you put the key it, then it decided what bit version to install, but as i got it from MSDN and not a dvd i pressume it only has the 64 or 32 bit files.

I just thought it would be a halfway house. I could use it for tv recording and backups and a domain controller. But terrible for non server stuff, which is not suprising, just didnt think it would be so difficult to get stuff working on it.
 
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Just a quick post to give the results of my performance tests. I wanted to work out the best config for network transfers and so tested single drives, mirrored drives, striped drives.

I'm using the latest HP Bios, 8GB memory, Nexenta + Napp-it, default zpools settings.
PerfTable.png


Full details are at:
http://hpproliantmicroserver-performancetest.blogspot.com/

zp01-stripe - Write 23.8GB Single File

image008.gif


zp01-stripe - Read 23.8GB Single File

image020.gif
 
I’m hoping that you guys can help me. I have one of the later models [last month’s offer] and I have fitted 2*2GB memory and 2*1TB Samsung F3 [in drive slots 2 and 3] along with the original drive in slot 1.

Everything POSTS OK but I am struggling to get a boot, the BIOS finds no boot drive. I have a copy of Windows Server Enterprise [all legit, as I am a student], at first I hoped to install it onto the 250G Drive in slot one from a bootable USB drive, but that didn’t work. Then I burnt the WS Enterprise .img file to a disk and installed a DVD Drive and that didn’t work. I also downloaded a WHS .iso trial and tried a dvd install but that didn’t work.

Looking around the BIOS it says any drive in parenthis is disabled, all my drives are between [...] charcters which is what parenthis means I guess? And I can find no way in BIOS to change that- all I seem to be able to do is change USB boot priority from High to Low, and that makes no difference it seems. Apart from that the only change I have made is to set the SATA to IDE.

I’m scratching my head, am I missing something- it may be a random though but the only disk in the box was the HP Documentation disk, am I missing a driver/bios disk? The only thing I haven’t tried is a freeNAS install, but I already have a homebrew freeNAS media server and what I really wanted was a Windows server to act as a printer server and data back-up/file server.

Please, someone, explain what I am doing wrong.
 
What kind of temperatures are people getting out of these today ? probably the highest ambient temperature since people started picking them up.
 
Gizmo_Ger said:
@CoolishGrunt
Have you tried to load Setup Defaults in BIOS?
Click to expand...

I reset the CMOS yesterday and now I getting no 'media found, check cable'.

In frustration I then went and got drunk- clearly there is media found as the piece of crap POSTs and lists all available drives and memory correctly.

I will try a Linux Live today, not that I want Linux on the box [nothing against Linux, but this box was bought for Windows Server, the freeNAS already deals with the Linux on my laptop].
 
faintuk said:
Does anyone know how to install and run WHS 2008r2 of a 8gb or 16gb pen drive?
Click to expand...
Well I tried it using a .img file of Windows Server Enterprise [which needs slightly less than 4GB space]. I just Googled something like ‘install Windows Server from USB’- I followed the instructions as regards making the USB stick bootable [and W7 reported that this was successful] then copied the .img to the USB stick.

But all the box said was remove media and refused to boot.
 
CoolishGrunt said:
I reset the CMOS yesterday and now I getting no 'media found, check cable'.

In frustration I then went and got drunk- clearly there is media found as the piece of crap POSTs and lists all available drives and memory correctly.

I will try a Linux Live today, not that I want Linux on the box [nothing against Linux, but this box was bought for Windows Server, the freeNAS already deals with the Linux on my laptop].
Click to expand...

Try disabling then re-enabling power to all sata ports, plus try changing Legacy IDE to IDE. sorry not sure on the exact pages they are in the BIOS...
 
CoolishGrunt said:
Well I tried it using a .img file of Windows Server Enterprise [which needs slightly less than 4GB space]. I just Googled something like ‘install Windows Server from USB’- I followed the instructions as regards making the USB stick bootable [and W7 reported that this was successful] then copied the .img to the USB stick.

But all the box said was remove media and refused to boot.
Click to expand...

I think you want to copy the files and folders to the USB drive.
So 'explore' the img file if you can, not sure if its similar to an ISO and you can open it like that?
 
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