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

TheBiznes · 16 Jul 2011 at 13:54

There is still an offer going new can be had for around £230 to £240 ish which you can claim back £100 before the 31st July. On Ebay some are going for £149 with money off already, and there are a few secondhand ones too.

TigerUK · 16 Jul 2011 at 14:13

ubern00b said:
I dont understand how you can "save" on cost by not using what you already have, and purchasing an £80 device. An HD5450 is £25 and will offload all decoding to the GPU when using XBMC, so "using up" system resources isnt an issue.

Saying that, I am buying an ATV2 for this exact purpose, its a sleek solution

my microserver is running whs2011, and running multple instances of vmware, so video streaming is probably going to kill it. would like to offload that job onto something else, wd hdtv looks better than appletv so will go for that

rG-tom · 17 Jul 2011 at 06:46

Has anyone found a fix to not being able to disable write cache on the secondary sata.port yet? I've spent all night trying to figure out why dc promo wasn't working and it turns out to be this!

Please help!

Thanks,

Tom.

smargh · 17 Jul 2011 at 11:45

Not that I've seen.

You can store the AD files on a different physical drive; that should make dcpromo work, but I haven't tested it.

Ice_Black · 17 Jul 2011 at 15:52

I am really considering buying this server, I have a few questions....

1) I will be using SABnzbd a lot, what the performance like when it required to unpacking/repairing files?

2) Server will be streaming HD movies to TV Media Player (hardware) - what the transfer speed like like on SMB and NFS?

3) I will be using Apache, PHP and MySQL to do some web development.

4) Which Linux OS do you recommend?

rG-tom · 17 Jul 2011 at 15:55

smargh said:
Not that I've seen.

You can store the AD files on a different physical drive; that should make dcpromo work, but I haven't tested it.

Well, ive just fixed it this morning!!

Flashed with a custom bios which makes the ODD sata port act and behave like it is part of the backplane, can even raid from it now if i wanted!

http://terabyt.es/2011/07/02/nas-build-guide-hp-n36l-microserver-with-nexenta-napp-it/

"Update BIOS and install hacked Russian BIOS" section gave me all the details i needed.

Brilliant!

Cheers

Tom.

aspirin · 17 Jul 2011 at 17:01

TigerUK said:
anyone know what's the best way to stream movies off the microsever onto the TV set without connecting it directly?

I would like some sort of media hub that can connect to WHS2011 and access certain folders on it. I don't want to display from the WHS2011 directly becaause it will use the up the system resources on it.

Look for less than £150 kit, less than £100 preferred.

Thanks

WD Live TV which I use with the same OS are you have installed. They are within your budget.

Zarf · 17 Jul 2011 at 20:22

Might be of interest to some, I'm running ESXi on my Microserver, amongst my VM's is an Ubuntu 11.04 server using ZFS-on-Linux with a 4x2TB drive RAIDZ.
Performance over Samba was pretty lacklustre (50-60MB/s range) but last night I updated to Samba 3.6 RC2 and enabled SMB2 operation, now I can get 100MB/s reads and Writes.

Write speeds to the RAIDZ aren't great, think I need more RAM (currently only 4GB in the server, with 2GB allocated to the Ubuntu VM) or a L2 Cache SSD. CPU usage isn't maxed out but write speeds drop from 100MB/s for the first few GB after boot to the 50-60MB/s range, even when testing with dd and CPU usage under 30%. Write speeds to the system drive remain high.

rG-tom · 17 Jul 2011 at 20:46

on say 4.5gb ISO files i can only get ~50MB/s write to the server and ~75MB/s read.....2x 2tb Hitachi Desktar 5k300s, Windows Server 2008R2 Enterprise, Running AD, DNS and DHCP, to my local Samsung F1 or Samsung SSD over a gigabit netgear switch.

What's the most reliable speed testing tool? I know watchingt he windows inbuilt one is meant to be as accurate as licking your finger and putting it in the air to see next months weather.

Zarf · 17 Jul 2011 at 22:22

rG-tom said:
on say 4.5gb ISO files i can only get ~50MB/s write to the server and ~75MB/s read.....2x 2tb Hitachi Desktar 5k300s, Windows Server 2008R2 Enterprise, Running AD, DNS and DHCP, to my local Samsung F1 or Samsung SSD over a gigabit netgear switch.

What's the most reliable speed testing tool? I know watchingt he windows inbuilt one is meant to be as accurate as licking your finger and putting it in the air to see next months weather.

The Win7/2008 one is actually not too bad, I timed some transfers with a stopwatch and got the same result.

rG-tom · 17 Jul 2011 at 22:40

Zarf said:
The Win7/2008 one is actually not too bad, I timed some transfers with a stopwatch and got the same result.

what speeds do you get with that combo and what drives?

AtomicBanana · 18 Jul 2011 at 00:46

Ok, I've dragged my heels for too long now, still using just 1Gb ram and I'm running into issues. What's the cheapest way to get 8GB in this thing?

EDIT. Never mind, found some. Hopefully should fix my issues

Zarf · 18 Jul 2011 at 01:09

rG-tom said:
what speeds do you get with that combo and what drives?

Sorry, i'm not quite sure what you meant here. In the Microserver I'm running 4x Samsung F4EG in it, but I'm limited by network speeds to around 100MB/s. The Server 2008 machine I was using to benchmark the Microservers Ubuntu VM is a separate physical computer.

When going server 2008 to a windows 7 client I can get 110-115MB/s on file transfers over the network, but this can use SMB2.1 which is a little bit more efficient than SMB2 on SAMBA.

rG-tom · 18 Jul 2011 at 02:21

So you don't have a microserver running 2k8?

I'm really struggling to figure out why my speeds are so low then! Microserver with 4gm of ram and 2x2tb hitachi 5k3 drives mirrored, 2008r2 enterprise with only ad, dns and dhcp running, in the same room as my main pc which is a sandybridge x64 windows 7 rig, over a netgear gigabit 8 port switch with a samsung ssd or samsung f1 drive, am I missing something in the basic config?

Zarf · 18 Jul 2011 at 04:14

rG-tom said:
So you don't have a microserver running 2k8?

I'm really struggling to figure out why my speeds are so low then! Microserver with 4gm of ram and 2x2tb hitachi 5k3 drives mirrored, 2008r2 enterprise with only ad, dns and dhcp running, in the same room as my main pc which is a sandybridge x64 windows 7 rig, over a netgear gigabit 8 port switch with a samsung ssd or samsung f1 drive, am I missing something in the basic config?

I do have a 2k8 VM on the microserver, but it's only got access to a datastore on the 160GB drive. Did a quick bench just now and only got 20MB writes, 50MB reads, but i think that's as a result of my playing around with RAM allocations earlier, will try and put things right tomorrow.

adamau5 · 18 Jul 2011 at 07:10

bought one of these yesterday.

to start with its getting 2x2tb raid 1 to auto backup my key data and the system drives of our pc's/laptops using whs11.

It will also be used for streaming media and will have the squeezeserve addin (which apparantly still works on 2011 whs).

Questions - anyone know of a way of sheduling shutdowns and wakeups on this server, also have anyone successfully got WOL working, i read of various issues.

Cheers

Adam.

Magic_x_uk · 18 Jul 2011 at 07:31

Can I ask on here some basic questions as this thread is full of many different uses for this unit.

Can I just buy one and perhaps just put Windows 7 on it. Buy a suitable graphics card with HDMI out so I can run XBMC from it.

Does it have a wireless card on it so it can connect to my router and home network

As at the moment I use a laptop and external HD. HDMI from laptop to TV and IR receiver to watch movies etc.

It just seems a lot of you are adding this and that to it. Confuses me as what I would actually need.

Thank you

agent_paul · 18 Jul 2011 at 08:33

Magic_x_uk said:
Can I ask on here some basic questions as this thread is full of many different uses for this unit.

Can I just buy one and perhaps just put Windows 7 on it. Buy a suitable graphics card with HDMI out so I can run XBMC from it.

Yes, I can't see why not. I'm currently using mine with XBMC in ubuntu 11.04 with an ATI 5450

Magic_x_uk said:
Does it have a wireless card on it so it can connect to my router and home network

No it doesn't but it will have a PCI-e x1 slot left over for a wireless card, if your going to place a graphics card in the other slot.

rG-tom · 18 Jul 2011 at 16:20

streaming HD over wireless isnt going to be particuliarly pretty though? wired is far better.

hartgeh3 · 18 Jul 2011 at 16:26

Has anyone added a Bluray drive to this? I am thinking of buying one and getting a Bluray drive so I can rip them straight to the hard drives. Will a internal bluray drive slot in? Also maybe add a graphics card for HD playback.