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

Al Vallario · 2 Jun 2011 at 15:46

ubern00b said:
2011.04.02 (A) (27 May 2011)

With the hack from wegotserved.com and it works?

The 'hacks' are modified versions of the BIOS with SouthBridge configuration options added; you don't use the hack with a copy of the original HP BIOS, you use it instead of it.

As far as I'm aware there is no hacked version of the most recent HP BIOS, 2011.04.02 (released on 27 May)

PiKe · 2 Jun 2011 at 15:48

Had a confirmation email from HP for the cashback today, £100 cheque winging it's way to our company

All in all, the server has cost only £87 (Vat reclaimed)

ubern00b · 2 Jun 2011 at 15:49

Al Vallario said:
The 'hacks' are modified versions of the BIOS with SouthBridge configuration options added; you don't use the hack with a copy of the original HP BIOS, you use it instead of it.

As far as I'm aware there is no hacked version of the most recent HP BIOS, 2011.04.02 (released on 27 May)

I get it, thanks for the clarification. I don't have mine yet so have yet to piece all the puzzle parts together

Al Vallario · 2 Jun 2011 at 15:56

ubern00b said:
I get it, thanks for the clarification. I don't have mine yet so have yet to piece all the puzzle parts together

That's no problem! I've had one of mine for the best part of six months now and I'm still experimenting.

Installed my SiL3132 chipset PCIe 2xSATA/eSATA controller card today. Tried flashing the BIOS to non-RAID mode, got terribly confused by the SiL flashing utility. All the commands might as well be written in Greek.

On the plus side, it works. Six drives up and running

DiCe! · 2 Jun 2011 at 16:23

I am almost certainly going to be getting one of these with a OS drive and a 2TB drive to start with, will up the TBs as money permits. Im deff interested in the Raid 5 that rebuilds the data if a disk fails. will have to play with that as ive never used raid before

steinooo · 2 Jun 2011 at 21:51

Hi guys can I float an idea with you owners?

Would this work, having it boot from 2 separate usb drives, 1 for ESXi with the internal hard drive being used for VMs, and the second usb drive with XBMC live on it, reading it's library from an external USB hard drive. Does that sound like a workable solution?? Obviously I'd need to add a new graphics card to output high def videos via HDMI

The way I'm looking at it is that if I can have two reasons to own it I can justify it more, and leverage my Revo to my bedroom which is currently acting as my "NAS" (i.e. running smb via XBMC) with my 2TB external hdd connected

PaulC2K · 3 Jun 2011 at 17:24

PiKe said:
Had a confirmation email from HP for the cashback today, £100 cheque winging it's way to our company

All in all, the server has cost only £87 (Vat reclaimed)

When did you send the claim form, and how long till you got email confirmation?

I sent mine at the start of last month, havent heard a peep yet :confused:

Still torn on whether to buy a 2nd one, but i'd be using the cashback to fund it.

Zarf · 3 Jun 2011 at 18:47

steinooo said:
Hi guys can I float an idea with you owners?

Would this work, having it boot from 2 separate usb drives, 1 for ESXi with the internal hard drive being used for VMs, and the second usb drive with XBMC live on it, reading it's library from an external USB hard drive. Does that sound like a workable solution?? Obviously I'd need to add a new graphics card to output high def videos via HDMI

The way I'm looking at it is that if I can have two reasons to own it I can justify it more, and leverage my Revo to my bedroom which is currently acting as my "NAS" (i.e. running smb via XBMC) with my 2TB external hdd connected

This would work, unplug the external drive when you install and first boot ESXi so that it doesn't autoformat it (not sure if it would do this to external USB drives, but better safe than sorry)
Obviously whenever you wanted to use XBMC you'd have to shutdown all your VM's. Might be better off using a full fat windows or linux install, have XBMC as an application, and run your VM's on top in VMware Server. Performance won't be quite as good as running on ESXi, but I think you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference.

I've nabbed some cheap gigabit Intel PCI-E nics on fleabay, going to see if this makes any difference to performance. Will be playing around with teaming and Jumbo Frames on my new managed switch. Going to resistor mod the fans first though.

DIABLO · 3 Jun 2011 at 19:00

PaulC2K said:
When did you send the claim form, and how long till you got email confirmation?

I sent mine at the start of last month, havent heard a peep yet
Still torn on whether to buy a 2nd one, but i'd be using the cashback to fund it.

You should have gotten a confirmation email, it says on the website that you should contat cthem if you don't hear anything within a week.

steinooo · 3 Jun 2011 at 20:33

Zarf said:
This would work, unplug the external drive when you install and first boot ESXi so that it doesn't autoformat it (not sure if it would do this to external USB drives, but better safe than sorry)
Obviously whenever you wanted to use XBMC you'd have to shutdown all your VM's.

Thank you

thinking of having XBMC booted up most of the time due to I want my NAS being hosted like this too!

Zarf said:
you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference.

seriously? You reckon performance of VMware server would compare to ESXi on a box like this? Been a while since I used VMware server, but that statement makes me :eek:

I've nabbed some cheap gigabit Intel PCI-E nics on fleabay, going to see if this makes any difference to performance. Will be playing around with teaming and Jumbo Frames on my new managed switch. Going to resistor mod the fans first though.

what switch have you got, and what is a resistor mod?

DIABLO · 3 Jun 2011 at 21:03

Adding a inline resistor to slow the fan down.

Rudeboy · 4 Jun 2011 at 15:08

Anyone noticed stutter when streaming from Windows Server 2008 R2?
Not major stutter, just a buffer update that occurs about every 5-10 mins and lasts for about 2 secs each time it occurs.

I have 2 identical hard disks, one installed with a default install of WHS2011 and the other installed with Server 2008 R2 SP1. Both installs share the same files from the same RAID array which is a separate physical array from the boot disk.

Streaming the same 1080P media files from both OS's to an HTPC running XBMC results in stutter from the Server 2008 install, while booting from the WHS2011 disk shows no stutter what so ever.

Anyone else noticed any stutter problems with Server 2008?

Both installs have exactly the same drivers installed and IPv6 disabled, but apart from that they're vanilla installs.

Zarf · 4 Jun 2011 at 18:57

steinooo said:
seriously? You reckon performance of VMware server would compare to ESXi on a box like this? Been a while since I used VMware server, but that statement makes me

Yes, for the kind of light loads I expect you'd be running. If your VM's are just idling most of the time or serving an occasional request you don't need to worry too much about performance.

what switch have you got, and what is a resistor mod?

Picked up a 3Com 4924 Layer 3 with 24 gigabit ports for a fiver on fleabay, best deal ever (they were around £2000 new, and £200+ usual fleabay price).
It works fine, just too noisy to have in my bedroom until I can slow the fans down with a resistor mod.

Incidentally I've been playing around with my VM's all evening. The VMXNET3 virtual adaptor is much better than the e1000 emulated one. I get approx 1.5Gb/s from VM to VM using iperf.
I'm now running with intel nics in the microserver, and all my clients which has improved things a bit. Still only getting around 50MB/s writes, 75MB/s reads to my Solaris ZFS RAIDZ VM over SMB. Looks like i'm CPU limited.

tbz_ck · 4 Jun 2011 at 19:18

steinooo said:
Hi guys can I float an idea with you owners?

Would this work, having it boot from 2 separate usb drives, 1 for ESXi with the internal hard drive being used for VMs, and the second usb drive with XBMC live on it, reading it's library from an external USB hard drive. Does that sound like a workable solution?? Obviously I'd need to add a new graphics card to output high def videos via HDMI

The way I'm looking at it is that if I can have two reasons to own it I can justify it more, and leverage my Revo to my bedroom which is currently acting as my "NAS" (i.e. running smb via XBMC) with my 2TB external hdd connected

You can run ESXi off a 1 or 2GB USB Stick from the internal USB port. That's what I do

_SBradley_ · 5 Jun 2011 at 11:45

Just tried running SpinRite on the 250 GB drive in the MicroServer. It was SLOW! Part of the reason was the number of errors I was getting! But then I put the drive in my PC, and it went a lot faster: estimated time to completion 5 hours vs 90 hours! So, two questions:

1. Is there any reason why running SpinRite on the MicroServer should be so slow? (I wanted to put my 2 TB drives in there and just let it run, but, at the rate I've just seen, it could take weeks to complete!)

2. Is getting replacement parts from HP easy enough? (I'm not planning on using the 250 GB drive in the MicroServer, but I'm sure I'd have a use for it, if it weren't bad!)

Al Vallario · 5 Jun 2011 at 15:15

_SBradley_ said:
Just tried running SpinRite on the 250 GB drive in the MicroServer. It was SLOW! Part of the reason was the number of errors I was getting! But then I put the drive in my PC, and it went a lot faster: estimated time to completion 5 hours vs 90 hours! So, two questions:

1. Is there any reason why running SpinRite on the MicroServer should be so slow? (I wanted to put my 2 TB drives in there and just let it run, but, at the rate I've just seen, it could take weeks to complete!)

2. Is getting replacement parts from HP easy enough? (I'm not planning on using the 250 GB drive in the MicroServer, but I'm sure I'd have a use for it, if it weren't bad!)

In the MicroServer you're not running the drive off the internal ODD SATA port by any chance, are you? If so, that'll explain the speed issues...

RJC · 5 Jun 2011 at 18:15

My system seems to of gone a bit pear shaped last night, both sets of array come up with degraded, after some mucking about I am hopefully rebuilding.

Running FREENAS with 2 x 2 RAID 1 arrays with the Samsung 2tb drives, the drives themselves seek ok.

_SBradley_ · 5 Jun 2011 at 18:53

Al Vallario said:
In the MicroServer you're not running the drive off the internal ODD SATA port by any chance, are you? If so, that'll explain the speed issues...

No, it was in the first main bay. Seems that SpinRite just doesn't run that well on the MicroServer. Which is strange, but oh well.

As for the errors, I tried the drive in my PC, and the error count still went up amazingly quickly. Then I tried another (new) Seagate drive (2 TB) in the PC, and the same thing happened! What the heck? I've never had a problem with any of my Samsung drives. (I think I'll post this question in the hard drive forum.)

mac1 · 5 Jun 2011 at 18:55

Excuse the questions, I've tried to look through the thread but it massive. I'm keen on getting one of these but have a few questions.

I currently have a Macbook Pro with my audio files on, a windows HTPC in the sitting room with my films and an airport extreme in the kitchen to play audio.

If i get on on these and buy WHS can I

1 Store all the files on the microserver and back it all up automatically?
2 Use the microserver to hold my itunes library?
3 Stream video wireless to the HTPC from the microserver? I appreciate I may need some homeplugs or something of that ilk to do this.
4 Start with 2 hard disks for safety and add as I need to.

steinooo · 5 Jun 2011 at 21:08

Zarf said:
Yes, for the kind of light loads I expect you'd be running. If your VM's are just idling most of the time or serving an occasional request you don't need to worry too much about performance.

Picked up a 3Com 4924 Layer 3 with 24 gigabit ports for a fiver on fleabay, best deal ever (they were around £2000 new, and £200+ usual fleabay price).
It works fine, just too noisy to have in my bedroom until I can slow the fans down with a resistor mod.

Incidentally I've been playing around with my VM's all evening. The VMXNET3 virtual adaptor is much better than the e1000 emulated one. I get approx 1.5Gb/s from VM to VM using iperf.
I'm now running with intel nics in the microserver, and all my clients which has improved things a bit. Still only getting around 50MB/s writes, 75MB/s reads to my Solaris ZFS RAIDZ VM over SMB. Looks like i'm CPU limited.

WOW! nice one! I'd be very interested to hear about your findings with jumbo frames. How many discs have you got, and which discs are they out of interest? Also what and how do you go about apportioning disc space to the ZFS VM?