Anyone with a HP Microserver?

By Storm
in Hardware Hangout

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Grand Master

+BudMan MVC

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  • MVC
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I have a N40L, bumped to 8GB, modified bios and added 2nd nic - my pfsense router runs as VM along with multiple other VMs and 3 other drives added with VM that is my NAS.

What is your questions/favor?

Grand Master

richardsim7

Posted
Posted

I have a N40L, bumped to 8GB, modified bios and added 2nd nic - my pfsense router runs as VM along with multiple other VMs and 3 other drives added with VM that is my NAS.

What is your questions/favor?

Why did you add a 2nd NIC? I have the same machine, should probably upgrade my RAM someday.

I guess i should have said anyone in the UK! :)

Ive lost my keys, apparently they are all the same...

You could give these guys a shout, my key says southco W-23 :)

Grand Master

+John Teacake MVC

Posted
  • MVC
Posted

I was wondering what Keys you meant ha! I thought you meant CD Keys but you mean door keys. Did you get a set? I am away this weekend but if you need one I could get one cut and post you one start of next week. Are they really all the same though? ...

Edit! You are about an hour away from me just realised :-p

Grand Master

Storm

Posted
  • Author
Posted

I did get some, but just lost them somehow! Pretty sure they are the same! If you could d that tthat would be brilliant!

Of course, I will compensate you :)

Where are you?

I was wondering what Keys you meant ha! I thought you meant CD Keys but you mean door keys. Did you get a set? I am away this weekend but if you need one I could get one cut and post you one start of next week. Are they really all the same though? ...

Edit! You are about an hour away from me just realised :-p

Grand Master

+BudMan MVC

Posted
  • MVC
Posted

Oh right, thought it might be for dual gigabit LAN. I'm running unRAID on mine :)

That's great, but you could just run unraid as VM and then do a bunch more with it as well. You see the storage VM there, that is my nas with raw access to 3 disks it serves up - but then I also have my router and my linux shell running 24/7 and then bunch of play/test boxes for different things.

If just running unraid - then the 2gb it came with it prob more than enough. Now what I have read is it really can go to 16GB, so thinking about doing that - would allow for more ram to each vm and still all running 24/7 etc..

Grand Master

Brian M. Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted

What's ESXi performance like running on the N40L (I have one delivered at home for me to setup this weekend!).

Was going to attempt to either hackintosh it with Snow Leopard, or run ESXi on it and run a newer build. I have 8GB of RAM on order (was supposed to have been delivered yesterday :( ), but if it supports 16GB then I may well do that.

Grand Master

richardsim7

Posted
Posted

If just running unraid - then the 2gb it came with it prob more than enough. Now what I have read is it really can go to 16GB, so thinking about doing that - would allow for more ram to each vm and still all running 24/7 etc..

Just wondered if upgrading the RAM would make extracting, urm, rar files faster :p

Grand Master

+BudMan MVC

Posted
  • MVC
Posted

I could not be happier with it.. Freaking thing uses like no power at all! Currently drawing 54.7 watts. That is with all those Vms running and 4 HDD in the thing. I get 70 to 90MBps when writing files to and from the NAS.

Tiny little box - takes up no room. And you could not beat the price. People in the UK had a mucher better deal on them, I know loads got them for like 100 quid.

Looking for a cheap dual port nic -- would like to have that option, and maybe move to 16GB -- if wife wouldn't kill me, I would prob by another one just to have ability to move Vms between hosts ;)

Grand Master

Brian M. Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted

I could not be happier with it.. Freaking thing uses like no power at all! Currently drawing 54.7 watts. That is with all those Vms running and 4 HDD in the thing. I get 70 to 90MBps when writing files to and from the NAS.

Tiny little box - takes up no room. And you could not beat the price. People in the UK had a mucher better deal on them, I know loads got them for like 100 quid.

Looking for a cheap dual port nic -- would like to have that option, and maybe move to 16GB -- if wife wouldn't kill me, I would prob by another one just to have ability to move Vms between hosts ;)

Mine cost ?212 - and then I get the ?100 cashback, so it'll work out at ?112.

My current plan if I go with ESXi is to have the OS and VMs on the 250GB drives that come with it, and then add the other 4 hard drives with my stuff on them (I'm just pulling them from USB caddies :p). I was tempted to get a smallish SSD as the boot/vm drive, but that takes it to being beyond a budget server IMO.

I've also got a second PCI-e NIC for it - it was like ?7 (bought it specifically for hackintosh compatibility just in case :p), but I guess it means I'm not using the onboard LAN (never liked using them for some reason), and I have a spare port :p.

Grand Master

n_K

Posted
Posted

ESXi supports up to 10.7 'officially'. I've got 10.8 working fine though but to use the serial number from my mac (so imessages and icloud works) I've made my own chameleon boot CD, on ESXi 5.0 it was a bit annoying, to boot from a non-EFI CD you had to put a custom EFI bios file in and edit the VM to use it using vi and disable it from using EFI again using vi which was a trick for ESXi and it'd all work fine although on powerup the VM would freeze and you'd get a message asking if you want to release the CD lock or not, you have to manually click cancel or chameleon just errors and this happens on every boot/reboot so it's a bit of a pain but the VM runs perfectly fine and smooth whilst using it from within vSphere client....

I upgraded to 5.1 (didn't need to unpatch/repatch the mac osx thing which I forgot to do which I guess was a bit dump but maybe the files weren't modified from 5.0 -> 5.1?) and it's completely changed, doing the above trick no longer work, it'll boot the CD but the CD will be unable to see the GPT hard drive at all any more, so I had to change the OS from mac osx to 'other 64 bit' and run it as BIOS not EFI, so it boots now without the 'CD ROM locked' message but on the vSphere client, mac runs much slower, the Y of the mouse is inverted so if you move your mouse left-down it actually move left-up, but again it picks up my mac serial fine and iMessage/iCloud works fine. As I don't use the vSphere client to use it, it's no bother to me (I've got remote usage on and just VNC in, everything works fine when doing this).

Hope that helps! :p

Grand Master

+BudMan MVC

Posted
  • MVC
Posted

I have had no issues with the onboard lan - I needed the other nic so I could isolate wan from lan so vm could be my physical networks router.

I am looking to get a dual nic so that I could break out vswitch for the admin of esxi, or whatever other uses I might find for being able to connect vswitch to different network segment, etc..

I got mine for like $279 with extra ram, extra nic and a 2TB drive to bumpup my storage for nas it was something a bit over $400 i think. Would have to break out the invoices.

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