HP Microserver+XPEnology

SirJinks said:
Seeing the cashback offer on the Gen8 and I'm considering it instead of a Synology box for NAS / backup purposes.

Is it possible to setup Xpenology on an SSD running on its own as a RAID 0 (to resolve the many reported fan problems) and at a later date install 2 HDD's and run those as a RAID 1 so the OS remains on a separate drive outside of the HDD's.

Bear in mind I'm a complete n00b with RAID etc so pretend you are replying to a 5 year old... and then dumb your answer down even further lol.
Click to expand...

You can do that raid set up, but xpenology installs itself to all hdds, you can't keep it restricted to one drive.
 
darkblade said:
I have 5.0-4493 running (on hardware, no VM) with 4 drives under RAID 5, using the onboard SATA.

I have a HP Smartarray P410 card installed and want to expand the setup with another 4 identical drives.
Is there a guide anyone can link to for this? The 4 new drives do not show up as unused devices in the above device scan (or anywhere in the DSM).
I've tried this with a RAID 5 array on the P410 and also 4 individual RAID 0 drives.
Click to expand...

Looks like you can't get HP Smart Array cards working on bare metal with XPEnology.

UPDATE: Purchased a LSI MR SAS 9240-8i card. Plugged the card into the HP Microserver and it works out of the box. The card recognises and assigns the disks as JBOD. The disks are then visible in DSM. Performing a data scrub before assigning the additional disks to the main volume.
Should be able to run 12 disks on this setup :)
 
Last edited:
1) Maybe a noob question here. Wanting to create a folder in xpenology that is mirrored on two different drives for redundancy. Don't need the whole drive to be mirrored but only one folder on more than one drive.
Also is there a way to make changes to the folder occur live across the drives, or for the sync to happen at a specified time?

2) re the update - currently running 5.0-4493 (DS 3612xs)
Reading above is this the right pat file to update 5.1-5055, and is this the latest stable update?
http://xpenology.me/xpenoboot-5-1-5055-1-released/

Thanks
 
Got incompatible update error trying to update using link above.

Have tried auto updating 5.2-5565 but this has not worked. Either stops midway, or needs a reset as freezes.
 
Successfully updated N54L to 5.2-5565.1

Installed the 5.2-5565 bootloader

I had to connect to a monitor and do a fresh install as the upgrade would not work.

This kept my Raid 5 array and all my data intact. Once server loaded the webpage it was on 5.2-5565 and needed to update to .1.

This would not connect after it restarted but a simple power off and restart fixed it.

Seems okay so far.
 
I'm planning on rebuilding one of my vSphere 5.5 hosts but I'm tempted to try something. I have the ability to boot the host using a USB stick internally and I wondered if it was possible to use a single 8-16GB stick to do the following:

a) Install the vSphere Hypervisor on the stick and create a single VMFS partition of around maybe 4-8GB
b) Install the Xpenology VMware boot VMDK for DSM 5.2 and associated DSM 5.2 PAT
c) Setup in vSphere for the Xpenology system to boot immediately at startup of the host.
d) setup iSCSI and NFS shares and create my additional Virtual Machines on a dedicated drive.

I've got a 12 hot swap bays and only 8 are on a SAS controller, if I do the above I can keep all 12 bays dedicated to storage and it would also act the same as the system 5.2 is based on with its 12 bays, otherwise I can pass through the SAS controller but not the individual SATA drives from the motherboard which would limit me in terms of expansion.

If the host that this is installed on accesses the VMs, will it see any performance issues? Does anyone know how to set the network up so that the NAS VM data does not leave the host for those VMS running on the NAS host like direct attached drives do?

I'm basically hoping that this setup would allow me to get similar performance as HDDs directly attached to the host.

Cheers

Chris
 
Sorry another question. Has anyone tried using DSM 5.2 to back up Windows Server 2012 R2 installs directly to the NAS using SMB? 5.1 didn't support SMB3 so it never worked but apparently DSM 5.2 does and I'm curious to know if anyone has tried it yet.

Cheers,

Chris
 
DIABLO said:
Stupid question but how do i delete the partition from the USB key, windows just says it is unallocated and refuses to touch it.
Click to expand...

windows key > diskpart.exe

the run the following commands:

List Disk
*note the USB disk number, you'll tell by its total size.
Select Disk # where # is the number allocated to the USB disk
list partitions > This will show the single 15mb partition
clean > This removes all partitions and data so ensure it is the right disk!
Exit
 
BlizzardX said:
windows key > diskpart.exe

the run the following commands:

List Disk
*note the USB disk number, you'll tell by its total size.
Select Disk # where # is the number allocated to the USB disk
list partitions > This will show the single 15mb partition
clean > This removes all partitions and data so ensure it is the right disk!
Exit
Click to expand...

Cheers
 
Updated to 5.2-5565 too, interface looks the same as version 5.0x.

Nice guide here:
http://xpenology.me/how-to-update-to-dsm-5-2-5565/

I needed to migrate data but this was seamless.
After above update to 5.2-5565.1 within synology as an auto-update.
Was not found on network after this, but a simple reboot fixed that.

What a great piece of software.

Still not figured out how to mirror data across specific folders on separate HDDs (not wanting to raid the whole drive). Anyone help with this?
 
Esxi issue

Hi

I had a issue where the esxi wouldnt load up on power up, so I set everything back to default in esxi and it started working ok. Great.

However I lost the vm hosts so these where added back, but the hard disks used to store data in synology have been lost.

Whats the process for recreating the storage hard drives and adding them back into the VM Synology host.

Many thanks
 
I'm considering purchasing a Gen 8 in a few weeks, however thinking of using Win 10 (when it's released, as I have a spare Win 7 lying around) instead of XPenology as I've never used Linux.

Question:

I'm likely to put 2*2GB in RAID 1 for storage, should I put the OS on a separate drive. I've seen the san disk (https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-026-SD&groupid=1657&catid=2101&subcat=2103) is on offer at the moment which is tempting. However I note I can't use a 5th SATA drive if eventually I want to add additional storage?

Do I need a GFX card for transcoding for Plex?

Is 2GB enough for Plex + Win 10, or should I upgrade to 4 or 8GB?
 
Furton said:
I'm considering purchasing a Gen 8 in a few weeks, however thinking of using Win 10 (when it's released, as I have a spare Win 7 lying around) instead of XPenology as I've never used Linux.
Click to expand...

Trust me - even if you have no knowledge of linux, installing and setting up expenology will be a walk in the park compared to trying to setup a windows on the gen8. I recently bought one for plex and logitech media server duties and the expenology software installs and runs very easily. All you need to do is basically create a bootable usb, plug it in and start using it

I tried windows 7 (wouldnt install - lack of drivers I believe)
Windows server - installed fine but no idea how to set it up properly
Freenas - again installed, but everything needs to be setup from scratch once running and again - my knowledge is lacking

Expenology - installed and runs very easily, setup was a breeze.

my 2 cents
;)
 
So. I'm in an interesting conundrum.

I've got an LSI 9211-8i which doesn't set the physical port numbers correctly in my 12 hot swap bays. This leads to DSM 5.2 showing a single HBA port as drive 1, 4 onboard SATA ports as 2-5 and the rest as HBA ports, but the phyiscal layout is 1-4 is SATA and 5 - 12 is HBA. This is a recognised LSI issue but as it has been around since firmware 11 and we're now at 20 I do not suspect it will change.

So, what I could do is use vSphere and map the drives using RDM (and cheat to create local disk RDMs) and assign them static scsi lun locations, this would solve the problem. I've got two choices, one is to merge my storage server with one of my current vSphere hosts, gain a power saving and reduce the number of nodes, or try and get vSphere installed on the current storage node. The main issue with number 2 is that it only has enough sata + hba ports to get to 12 bays and using a local drive as a datastore will limit me to 11 drives.

The main question is, is it possible to create a datastore on the ESXI USB for the synology DSM boot image VMDK? This would save me a drive slot and give me vSphere running so I can assign the drives correctly.

Cheers,

Chris
 
Scotspaul said:
Trust me - even if you have no knowledge of linux, installing and setting up expenology will be a walk in the park compared to trying to setup a windows on the gen8. I recently bought one for plex and logitech media server duties and the expenology software installs and runs very easily. All you need to do is basically create a bootable usb, plug it in and start using it

I tried windows 7 (wouldnt install - lack of drivers I believe)
Windows server - installed fine but no idea how to set it up properly
Freenas - again installed, but everything needs to be setup from scratch once running and again - my knowledge is lacking

Expenology - installed and runs very easily, setup was a breeze.

my 2 cents
;)
Click to expand...

Considering changing to a gen8 myself, no issues at all with xpenology at all ?
 
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