Storage The HP Micro Server Thread

Might get myself another Microserver. The Gen8 is monstrously expensive at £370, and ebuyer didn't have the N54L in stock, Still, will have to keep an eye out.

Sam

 

ebuyer have them in stock according to this

 

The Gen8 with a PS1810 switch is tempting though, Sam! Not that my N54L isn't doing its job well, but the Gen8 would be a nice upgrade.

 

Gen8 has few nice new features (dual ethernet, IPMI ethernet, SD card slot), still not sure if it is worth the price increase. We had Gen8 at ~200 euros for few weeks last year, that was tempting (lowest price Gen7 ever was in my country was ~130 euros).

 

Year long bump to this awesome thread

Gen8 now at £119 after cashback.

Sam

 

Got one. Awesome bit of kit. Just add big HDD's and OS. Instant low powered NAS box. Cashback is a breeze to claim as well

 

Does anyone know what is the largest size HDD a N36L can take? I've read in some places that it's 3TB and in others that 3TB is the largest that it can boot from but can deal with larger storage drives - I'm running WHS2011 on mine btw.

Cheers

 

I've noticed a fair few more people are running HP Gen8 servers. What are your thoughts? How have you set them up?

Cheers,
Sam

 

I've had one for a few weeks though I've not yet spun it up.

I've bought a couple of 4TB WD Red drives to start the migration, and then will cannibalise the drives from my old server as well eventually. 128GB SSD in the optical drive bay and will be running W2012 R2 standard.

Duties of general file share and Plex, maybe centralised backup (not sure on that yet), but nothing too heavyweight.

It's a nice bit of kit, hardware wise, robust and well put together.

 

Ahh, That sounds mostly like what i'm planning. I've heard though, that you can only boot from the main SATA port, or is it now possible to boot from the port that would be used by the DVD drive?

Sam

 

My brief research has suggested that there's no issue booting from that SATA port reserved for the optical drive, so was hoping it wouldn't be an issue. As I say, I've not spun it up yet though, so time will tell.

 

Running my Gen 8 as a VM workbox, the old N40L became a dedicated Plex server as it is flaky under VMware.

The Gen 8 is a great wee box, was a little ticked that the LOM was only until BIOS has completed unless you get a license. For a VMware box I don't need that although you can get them on the bay for sub £40.
Stuck an extra 8Gb in and a bunch of smallish drives in so I can separate the VM's (plus another quad Gigabit NIC.... just so i can give each box it's own NIC which helps with login/rebuilds). Have a Server 2012 domain running and a number of test workstations for development.
Also run an XP box to admin my IP cameras (the motion detection is only compatible with ancient IE versions), and a Mint instance for a bit of variety.
Not missed a beat so far. Could probably do with some extra RAM.

But...
Just picked up a Tyan dual Xeon box for zip, so that'll become the Domain box under VMware.
Have 32Gb of ECC on the way for that, so that will free up the Gen 8 for more shennigans of the VM type. Hope to learn how to cluster AD Domain services, so may do that for a laugh.
Just need to pick up another quad Gigabit card for the new box and aggregate some ports on the switch

Enjoy the Gen 8, so much can be done with it as others have said not just a grown up NAS.

TTFN
S.

 

That's all good stuff to know. Mine will be used for Plex mostly, And as i'm a lazy old bugger, most of my content will be MKV's, So i do wonder whether i need a CPU upgrade from the stock Celeron. I'll have to keep an eye on what other peoples results are like.

Sam

 

I'm running Plex on a J1900 now and it can't reliably transcode high bitrate videos - the G1060t isn't much of an upgrade, so I'm keeping my eyes peeled for a 1260L or 1265Lv2.

The i3 3220T and 3240T should work as well, though intel has updated the ark to say ECC isn't supported, even though I'm pretty sure they're ECC capable.

 

Anyone have any suggestions for a cheap RAID5/6 capable card for the Gen7?

Software RAID sucks balls. Over five hours just to build a 3 x 1TB HDD software RAID5 array!

 

homeserver forum recommends hp smart array raid p410 card fleabay

 

Thanks.

I'll do some research into the P410.

 

OK, I'm finally getting to grips with OMV, and have a RAID5 array set up serving media and holding a "live archive" of my stuffs. This array is set to back up periodically to a DAS box, which is backed up manually to a portable HDD.

The only thing I haven't set up yet, is an offsite backup which will be purely for important stuff like documents and photos. This will likely be backed up to the cloud, but not before I encrypt it, because I don't fully trust cloud security.

What are you peeps using for sturdy encryption?

 

For anyone looking to upgrade their Microserver RAM

I took a punt on a couple of these two weeks ago, but I didn't want to post the link until I could try them out.

PC3-10600E 4GB ECC Memory

It comes from 'murica so it took a while, but I thought two 4GB sticks for less than £21 delivered was worth mentioning. The ones that arrived were the PC3L low voltage DIMMs but they work a treat.

 

To save me the time of searching google..... Did you put these in a GEN 8 or one of the earlier models????