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

TurGe said:
Yup I am gonna get F4's think I have decided on using windows 2008 R2, I still would like confirmation that I will be able to connect the Optical header to the hard drive that comes with, I can then mount that in the top bay and keep the 4bay for the F4's and Raid 5 through windows.
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Yes you can use the Optical drive header to run a 5th harddrive or even the esata for a 6th drive. The instrauctions say you should use a sata cable with a right angle at one end as the sata connector on the board is right below the drive caddies and there is limited room to fit a straight cable but it has been done. You'll also need to install a custom bios to get the esata and the optical drive header running at full speed, details here
 
Right, just tried to install WHS2011 onto the 250gb drive (plugged into the sata port that the optical drive would use) via an optical drive plugged into usb. It gets to 32%

5gb ram,
Freecom DVD drive (via USB on front),
stock 250gb hdd in Optical SATA port


Have tried a couple of times now and it always gets to the same place, 32%.. sits there for a while, screen briefly flickers then a few seconds later it says 'There was a problem duing the installation'... Nothing in the logs that I can pick up on.. Last step in logs is 'Launching Win7 setup from X:\sources\setup.exe with cmd line: setup.exe /uilanguage:en-is /unattend:x:\unattend.xml'

Any ideas?

Sam
 
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Hi guys

Wonder if I can get some advice?

I must say before I start that I am a COMPLETE novice when it comes to servers, so please go easy on me!

Got my microserver today. I have installed 2x2tb Samsung F4s into it, and that is it hardware wise. I have then installed Windows 7 onto the drive that came with the Microserver. I will only be using it to share media files around my network (2 laptops, 1 of which is wired) and doing some PS3 media encoding, as well as a bit of newsgroup downloads.

Windows seems to have installed fine. I have then mapped the two drives so they can be shared over the network.

Just copying a file from my wired laptop to the media server, and it is copying at 6MB/second.

I am guessing this is not too good? I have tried to read as much of this thread as possible and others seem to be getting much better speeds.

What can I do to improve this? Is it because I am using the drives as individual drives rather than RAID? Is it because I only have the 1gb of RAM? Is it because I am using Windows 7 and should be using more dedicated server software????

As I say I'm a complete novice, so any help is greatly appreciated as I don't have a clue where to start!

Thanks.
 
PlanetGong said:
Hi guys

Wonder if I can get some advice?

I must say before I start that I am a COMPLETE novice when it comes to servers, so please go easy on me!

Got my microserver today. I have installed 2x2tb Samsung F4s into it, and that is it hardware wise. I have then installed Windows 7 onto the drive that came with the Microserver. I will only be using it to share media files around my network (2 laptops, 1 of which is wired) and doing some PS3 media encoding, as well as a bit of newsgroup downloads.

Windows seems to have installed fine. I have then mapped the two drives so they can be shared over the network.

Just copying a file from my wired laptop to the media server, and it is copying at 6MB/second.

I am guessing this is not too good? I have tried to read as much of this thread as possible and others seem to be getting much better speeds.

What can I do to improve this? Is it because I am using the drives as individual drives rather than RAID? Is it because I only have the 1gb of RAM? Is it because I am using Windows 7 and should be using more dedicated server software????

As I say I'm a complete novice, so any help is greatly appreciated as I don't have a clue where to start!

Thanks.
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Does the laptop have a gigabit network interface?
 
How about the router or switch you're connecting though or are you connecting directly to the microserver with your laptop?
 
I'm currently going via my router (dir-615), which I've just noticed only has a 10/100 switch, however I would therefore still expect the speeds to be up around the 10MB/second area? Might try and connect directly to the server to see what transfer speeds that produces?
 
Thats majority of your problem. If you connect directly the speed will be limited by the laptops harddrive so about ~50MB/s.
 
So if I went with a gigabit switch instead of going through my router I could expect speeds of about 50MB/s you reckon? That's still a lot better than 6MB/s!

Just linked the two together directly and got transfer speeds of around 95MB/s.
 
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Nice, i thought it would be a lot slow then that as laptop drives are generally slower then desktop drives, thats about what i get with my desktop transfering to and from the Microserver. So new router time then i guess.
 
PlanetGong said:
I have Virgin cable currently which has a modem and router. Where would the gigabit switch fit in?

Thanks very much for all your help.
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Modem -> Router -> Switch, and then multiple cables from the switch to all your other devices.

doing some more playing around tonight, after running into problems with Solaris (found out that the Open-VM-Tools version has a version of VMXNET3 which does support Jumbo Frames, but ran into headache after headache of compilation errors and dependencies)

So I've shutdown Solaris and brought up an Ubuntu Server VM, Installed ZFS (http://zfsonlinux.org/) which went surprisingly smoothly. I was able to import my zfs pool created easily with no data loss ('zfs import -f' and it pops up instantly with the folder mounted where you'd expect).
So far, So good - not even enabled Jumbo Frames yet and I'm getting 90MB/s reads, 50MB/s Writes over Samba. Better than Solaris.

dd benching shows me at 265MB/s reads (40% cpu) , 83MB/s writes (50% cpu) to my 4 drive RAIDZ. Writes could be a bit higher but i can live with it.
 
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Thanks very much.

Using the disks as they are obviously I have no data redundancy if the disks fail. Is it worth running raid with the two disks? I've seen a few people mention RAID 5 but I see you need at least three disks for that. If I had three 2tb disks running raid 5 how much usable space would I have? Is there noticeable speed benefits, or is it mainly piece of mind?
 
PlanetGong said:
Thanks very much.

Using the disks as they are obviously I have no data redundancy if the disks fail. Is it worth running raid with the two disks? I've seen a few people mention RAID 5 but I see you need at least three disks for that. If I had three 2tb disks running raid 5 how much usable space would I have? Is there noticeable speed benefits, or is it mainly piece of mind?
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I have been looking at Raid 5 with 3*2TB disks and using te online calculators you end up with 4TB Storage
 
samcat said:
Right, just tried to install WHS2011 onto the 250gb drive (plugged into the sata port that the optical drive would use) via an optical drive plugged into usb. It gets to 32%

5gb ram,
Freecom DVD drive (via USB on front),
stock 250gb hdd in Optical SATA port


Have tried a couple of times now and it always gets to the same place, 32%.. sits there for a while, screen briefly flickers then a few seconds later it says 'There was a problem duing the installation'... Nothing in the logs that I can pick up on.. Last step in logs is 'Launching Win7 setup from X:\sources\setup.exe with cmd line: setup.exe /uilanguage:en-is /unattend:x:\unattend.xml'

Any ideas?

Sam
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Fixed it... The disk I was using was an image burnt from a friends technet (whilst waiting for my genuine copy to arrive), mine arrived this morning and installed perfectly, so must have been a bad burn.

:)

Sam
 
Just bought one of these and after speed reading the thread am I right in saying there is no driver support for 2003 Server?

With the current £50 cashback I'm considering going Server 2008 R2 Foundation anyone using this?

It will be used for Streamin/Backups/SQL/Download & FTP.

I have bought a Intel NIC and the plan is to run 2003/2008 server with a XP VM tied to the additional NIC handling a FTP Server so hopefully isolating the rest of the network and data from any potential hackers. Thats the theory anyway.
 
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