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

If I got this and installed a half hight graphics card, would this have enough ooomph to play back HD/blue ray if I put a blue ray drive in it?

Under windows server i'm thinking.

EDIT: found my answer with a bit of googling, and it should work.
 
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For those using their Microserver as a download box with windows/utorrent and use Firefox uTorrent Status is pretty awesome. And also if you have a android phone Transdroid is pretty awesome for adding and administrating torrents remotely.
 
beavis said:
Do you have the battery+cache module?

There's a HP Customer notice that warns "Note: When the Battery Backed Write Cache is not included in the configuration, even moderate disk I/O can negatively impact server performance."
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsuppor...Id=110&prodSeriesId=3885791&prodTypeId=329290

I was considering a P212/ZM but the battery+cache module is pretty pricey :(
Click to expand...

Yes, I have the battery/cache module and I've also waited for the RAID5 array to fully initialize before attempting any benchmarks.

I've booted the unit from the hp smart cd and can see that array acceleration is enabled in the configuration.

I'm on holiday at the moment, but once I get back I'll have a proper look at it.
 
Thats the ATI card people reccomend yes, the nvidia equivalent is the gt520.
You will probably need one of these as well as the standard low profile bracket will not work unless you cut it because the cut out for the screw retainer is on the wrong side.
 
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Playing around with ESXi now, very sexy :D Took a little bit of fiddling around to get it working but now it's running from a USB stick. I've got a Solaris Express 11 VM running ZFS RAIDZ on four 2TB datastores on my four 2TB drives, disk performance is surprisingly good, Bonnie++ benches 135MB/s writes, 365MB/s reads. Network performance is also OK over iperf to the Intel NIC in my Server 2003 box, around 800Mb/s. SMB performance to my server 2003 machine isn't great though, only 20-30MB/s. It's a lot better to my Win7 machine at roughly 50-60MB/s, which is about what iperf was getting to that box (need to get another Intel NIC and do some TCP/IP tweaks :) ) Not seen the CPU go over 80% usage yet.

I'm liking the ESXi approach so much that i'll probably put ESXi on my main server box and convert my 2003 install to a VM, At some point I'll bring up Server 2008 VM's on both boxes and set up a proper redundant domain system. Wish I'd done this years ago tbh, It's so much more flexible.
 
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tbz_ck said:
Zarf,

if you know of any decent tweaks for ESXi on this Microserver I'm all ears mate :)
Click to expand...

It's pretty much running stock atm, ESXi 4.1, HP version. Not sure if it counts as a tweak but I had to put the block size up to 8MB in order to get 2TB datastores, the default 1MB Blocks limits you to 256GB. This required deleting all the automaticaly created ones (one of which was stubborn and the drive had to be manually partition wiped using my gparted live usb) before I could recreate them.

I'm assuming VMWare turns on TCP offloading etc, couldn't see an obvious setting for it.
 
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Yea I knew about the block size. I have 1 TB drives so used 4MB as the block size. I know of one disk tweak if you are using Windows Home Server virtualised and have other VM's that are disk intensive. It stops drive extender crippling performance of other Virtual disks.

I didn't use the HP version. Standard ESXi 4.1 install straight onto USB stick.
 
Mine's now setup and working :) (just a few bits left to configure)

Had to revert to Freenas 7.2 as the SATA controller isn't supported in 8.

Booting directly from the internal usb running the embedded version. I have the 250GB drive setup as a download/temp drive and 2x2TB Samsung setup in ZFS filled with media.

I've got Sabnzbd, Subsonic and Sickbeard all setup and working a treat.

Will do some speed tests in the next few days just to check how well it's doing :)
 
Does anyone know what I can buy to get audio on this? All I want to do is record from a internet radio station so I need some kind of audio.

I can't seem to find a low profile audio card that would fit, does anybody know of one?

I'm currently doing it on my PC but leaving it on all day just so I can record a few hours of radio is using allot of Power!!
 
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