HP ProLiant MicroServer

Dingatron

GaryCocs wrote: »

Hi Lads, quick one there, where is the sata cable and power cable for the dvd/hd slot? Or is it just a port on the board?

There's a spare molex connector at the top but you'll need your own SATA cable. There a review/guide here

http://www.homeserverland.com/2011/06/hands-on-hp-proliant-microserver-review/

silvine

I put an NVIDIA GT210 graphics card in my Microserver to connect it to my TV. The machine keeps rebooting after about 10-20 seconds, no matter what I do. This even happens when I am in the BIOS.

This prevents me from installing/running any OS. I think this might be a hardware issue connected to the graphics card. HP have already replaced the motherboard for me but the issue persists.


Has anyone experienced similar problems here?
Is there something I need to turn on in the BIOS to enable the graphics card/prevent reboots?
I am reluctant to update my BIOS because if it reboots during an update I might wreck the machine.

EDIT: I am prepared to fork out for a different graphics card if this is causing the issue. Can anyone recommend a card that will definitely output HD over HDMI and which will work automatically with this machine? I was originally going to buy an ATI Radeon HD 5450.

Wcool

How much power is your GT210 drawing and how much can your PSU provide? Symptoms feel like a PSU that can't keep up...

PS add something for the motherboard, disks and CPU as well of course.

slowlydownwards

Got 6450, 5450 should work just as well.

Win7 - Smooth 1080p playback in xbmc, video and sound over HDMI works fine.

Linux - Video and audio over HDMI works, smooth playback in xbmc. However ATI drivers are so-so, not as nearly well developed as nVidia ones.

Ended up booting into win7 more regularly, mostly because the 10foot interface is easier to set up as well as being more eye candy out of the box (zoomed in desktop @ 1920*1080 + kylo, etc).

The card in the above link does not include low profile bracket which I had to get separately. Otherwise very happy with it.

silvine

Specs about GT210 and 5450 here. They look fairly similar.
http://www.hwcompare.com/376/geforce-gt-210-vs-radeon-hd-5450/


The HP Server provides 150W.

Wcool

Yes after some searching it does not look like a power problem anymore.

Let's say your PSU can provide 75% of its quoted max = 150 x .75 = 112

My own experience with 5 disks is about 70 watts.


http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-210/specifications says it takes 30 watts max

Well within range.

All I can say: try to put it in another computer and see what happens

vibe666

silvine wrote: »

EDIT: I am prepared to fork out for a different graphics card if this is causing the issue. Can anyone recommend a card that will definitely output HD over HDMI and which will work automatically with this machine? I was originally going to buy an ATI Radeon HD 5450.

i don't suppose you're in the blanch area are you?

i have a couple of spare low end pci express gfx cards you could borrow to try out just to confirm 100% if that is the problem?

i can't remember the exact details of the cards, but at least one of them is a low profile (and low power) fanless model which would definitely fit inside the microserver.

Zardoz

Deal has been renewed again according to Hotukdeals.
Nice one.

Dingatron

HP refused my application today on the basis that my invoice wasn't an invoice. Bought from HPShop.ie (Eureka) online. Wouldn't mind the invoice is marked as such and I have a valid server serial which could have probably been tracked. Anyone else have issues with this or what documentation did you receive from HPShop?

settings

Dingatron wrote: »

HP refused my application today on the basis that my invoice wasn't an invoice. Bought from HPShop.ie (Eureka) online. Wouldn't mind the invoice is marked as such and I have a valid server serial which could have probably been tracked. Anyone else have issues with this or what documentation did you receive from HPShop?

its been along time since I got mine (also from hpshop.ie) but I'm sure I emailed hpshop.ie asking for an invoice (giving order no. or whatever- you need a number from box i think) which I then used as part of the cashback deal. I think i got an email confirming I would be getting a cashback but after a very long wait I heard nothing so emailed them and they sent the cheque immediately.

Saadyst

Dingatron wrote: »

HP refused my application today on the basis that my invoice wasn't an invoice. Bought from HPShop.ie (Eureka) online. Wouldn't mind the invoice is marked as such and I have a valid server serial which could have probably been tracked. Anyone else have issues with this or what documentation did you receive from HPShop?

I had similar; I wasn't sent an invoice, but I mailed the delivery docket to the HP promo people.

They mailed me back saying I need an invoice - so I contacted HPshop via their web mail system giving them my order number etc. Ten minutes later one of their staff emailed me a PDF copy which I mailed on to the HP folks and they accepted it straight away.

Dingatron

Thanks I was on to HPShop.ie this morning and I got a quick reply back with the invoice attached. Top marks for customer service! HP accepted it and its now being processed.

silvine

Got this working in the end. It's a nice piece of kit. I mostly use Macs and I am surprised by how upgradable this is.

Has anyone replaced the noisy fan?

From what I read here (http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1193-page7.html) I've to do something with the pins on the new fan. Anyone try this? Is it easy?

Shougeki

Is this still going? Is there an updated claims form somewhere that i can get a copy of before I purchase it?

frash

Shougeki wrote: »

Is this still going? Is there an updated claims form somewhere that i can get a copy of before I purchase it?

http://www.hpshop.ie/Microserver.pdf

Shougeki

Thanks! I had a look and couldnt find it.

Im thinking of an internal memory stick, 4x 2T Green WD disks, and sticking unraid on it. Just wondering (having read most of the thread), is that what people would suggest?

silvine

Shougeki wrote: »

Thanks! I had a look and couldnt find it.

Im thinking of an internal memory stick, 4x 2T Green WD disks, and sticking unraid on it. Just wondering (having read most of the thread), is that what people would suggest?

At the moment it's serving as a htpc but unraid is my eventual plan for the machine. There's good info about unraid several pages back.

You will need a license for four discs though. Also the fan is audible and this may affect where you set it up.

BaconZombie

What license are you talking about?
If the RAID controller locked down in some way?

silvine wrote: »

At the moment it's serving as a htpc but unraid is my eventual plan for the machine. There's good info about unraid several pages back.

You will need a license for four discs though. Also the fan is audible and this may affect where you set it up.

Jonathan

BaconZombie wrote: »

What license are you talking about?
If the RAID controller locked down in some way?

UnRAID

howamidifferent

I have two of these servers, one has a HP P410 hardware raid controller in it, the other I use FlexRaid on for storage pooling and snapshot raid. Works like a charm...

Shougeki

Just read that about UnRAID. Might try out FreeNAS 8.

Basically, I got a pretty chunky amazon voucher recently. So grabbed one of these (£225 inc shipping to dublin), 4x Seagate ST2000DL003 (£78 ea)

I still havent decided whether to put the OS on a flash drive (32GB with 25m read/15m write should be sufficient?Any suggestions?) or whether to use the supplied 250GB drive as OS and an extra bit of storage.

Thinking about i might just go with a stripped down version of CentOS in the end.

Really looking forward to this arriving.

vibe666

you'll be better off with freenas on a usb stick than a hdd, it's a bit of a waste of a hdd if nothing else and once it's booted, the boot drive is pretty much sitting there idle with the OS sitting entirely in memory.

something to consider with freenas is that freenas8 is more geared towards business use, so not all of the fun stuff has been ported to it from freenas7 and it may or may not be in the future.

with 4 disks i'd say stick to freenas7, aside from anything performance will be better on a lower specced machine with freenas7 as the hardware requirements for v8 are a lot higher, whereas v7 will run on just about anything you've got laying around from the last 10-12 years or more.

Shougeki

That was the reason i was going to go with a stripped down version of CentOS. I wonder what the watt/energy usage of the spare disks is...
Anyways, Ill make that decision when it arrives. Got the mounting bracket and extra cables for a fiver, so can always mess around with both and see which i like :P

Now to look for a cheap-enough well performing flash drive....

thesteve

vibe666 wrote: »

you'll be better off with freenas on a usb stick than a hdd, it's a bit of a waste of a hdd if nothing else and once it's booted, the boot drive is pretty much sitting there idle with the OS sitting entirely in memory.

something to consider with freenas is that freenas8 is more geared towards business use, so not all of the fun stuff has been ported to it from freenas7 and it may or may not be in the future.

with 4 disks i'd say stick to freenas7, aside from anything performance will be better on a lower specced machine with freenas7 as the hardware requirements for v8 are a lot higher, whereas v7 will run on just about anything you've got laying around from the last 10-12 years or more.

They're putting the 'fun stuff' back into 8.1 though. It runs fine off the internal USB key also, but note freenas doesn't support wake on lan on the microserver

vibe666

is the 250gb disk it comes with mounted separately to the 4 internal drive bays?

if so, you could set the 4 big disks as a single array and set them to spin down after 30 minutes of idle time and then use the single disk as a download point for torrents or whatever so that the other disks don't keep getting spun up all the time for every little thing.

then just create a task to move everything over once a day or whatever for archiving to the RAID array.

good to know the fun stuff is coming back in to v8.1 of freenas tho, i was missing it.

edit: looks like they're jumping straight to v8.2, but there's lots of interesting stuff in there that would suit me, so i might give it a lash.

thesteve

No, it's in one of the bays. You can mount it in the optical bay though with an additional bracket.

Shougeki

vibe666 wrote: »

if so, you could set the 4 big disks as a single array and set them to spin down after 30 minutes of idle time and then use the single disk as a download point for torrents or whatever so that the other disks don't keep getting spun up all the time for every little thing.

That was my plan. Got the bracket anyways just in case (for about 2.50£). Lets me try CentOS on the drive with a nice chunky filesystem like you mentioned.

vibe666 wrote: »

edit: looks like they're jumping straight to v8.2, but there's lots of interesting stuff in there that would suit me, so i might give it a lash.

Im probably going to try both CentOS & FreeNAS, and muck about. No reason not to :P

For FreeNAS8 what would be the recommended r/w for a flash drive to put internally?

mcgovern

Shougeki wrote: »

That was my plan. Got the bracket anyways just in case (for about 2.50£). Lets me try CentOS on the drive with a nice chunky filesystem like you mentioned.



Im probably going to try both CentOS & FreeNAS, and muck about. No reason not to :P

For FreeNAS8 what would be the recommended r/w for a flash drive to put internally?

I have it on the cheapest stick I could find. I think its one of these and works fine.
I'm also running the beta for 8.2 which has plugin support for the fun stuff. It doesn't work well at all I have to say, its easier to use the old ways of installing stuff in my opinion, and I'm a very novice user. Its supposed to be getting re-wrote at the moment though.

Edit: To clarify, FreeNas itself seems to work very well, its just the new plugin method I don't like.

vibe666

Shougeki wrote: »

For FreeNAS8 what would be the recommended r/w for a flash drive to put internally?

i don't think it would affect performance much at all other than during boot time (which isn't going to be all that often anyway) so just whatever you can find should do fine.

your only real concerns around performance would be disk I/O and CPU/RAM.

the other thing to consider is that if you use freenas8 and ZFS as the file system (and with 4x 2tb disks you probably should), you'll want a good chunk of ram to get the best performance out of it. by default prefetching is disabled if you have less than 4gb of usable (i.e. not including that used by the OS itself) RAM as well, so you''ll definitely want to load it up with as much as you can get your hands on.

also, from reading through the forums, if you have over 6tb of storage, you'll want 1gb of ram per terabyte of storage to get the most performance out of it.

i have freenas8 running as a VM at home on ESX 5 (HP ML110 G6, Pentium G6950 w/8gb RAM) managing 8x 2tb disks as a single ZFS volume with dual parity (the ZFS equiv. to RAID6) and it was really sluggish compared to my old pre-built NAS even when it was allocated 4gb of ram (max. of about 30MB/s write performance v's 100MB/s in the old NAS). i tried adding more vCPU's, but the only thing that helped was giving it more RAM to play with.

my next upgrade will be putting 16gb of RAM in the ESX server, so i'll really be able to give it all the memory it needs to see how well it can perform with plenty of RAM.

I might also see if reducing the CPU grunt makes any difference to performance if it's got all the RAM it can eat.

Shougeki

vibe666 wrote: »

your only real concerns around performance would be disk I/O and CPU/RAM.

the other thing to consider is that if you use freenas8 and ZFS as the file system (and with 4x 2tb disks you probably should), you'll want a good chunk of ram to get the best performance out of it. by default prefetching is disabled if you have less than 4gb of usable (i.e. not including that used by the OS itself) RAM as well, so you''ll definitely want to load it up with as much as you can get your hands on.

Made sure to order an extra 4GB stick (It comes with 2GB)

vibe666

Shougeki wrote: »

Made sure to order an extra 4GB stick (It comes with 2GB)

that'll definitely do it anyway.

Sir Oxman

http://www.dabs.ie/products/hp-proliant-microserver-g7-n40l-nhp-eu-svr-7RMD.html?utm_source=ie+email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email180412&utm_content=e800

Now 279.00 down from 291.00

i had it in my basket last weekend and cancelled as cash is tight-ish but this is still VERY tempting.

Edit: Listed as 279 but when added to basket price is 310.48!
Also, when I click on the offer in the email offer from Dabs, it shows 279.99 in Firefox but in IE9 shows 310.48!

Shougeki

gambiaman wrote: »

http://www.dabs.ie/products/hp-proliant-microserver-g7-n40l-nhp-eu-svr-7RMD.html?utm_source=ie+email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email180412&utm_content=e800

Now 279.00 down from 291.00

i had it in my basket last weekend and cancelled as cash is tight-ish but this is still VERY tempting.

Edit: Listed as 279 but when added to basket price is 310.48!
Also, when I click on the offer in the email offer from Dabs, it shows 279.99 in Firefox but in IE9 shows 310.48!

Ordered it last week from Amazon at £237 with free delivery. Which is 290€

romperstomper

Shougeki wrote: »

Ordered it last week from Amazon at £237 with free delivery. Which is 290€

how did you get them to deliver it? it says for me 'wont deliver to default address'

cheers

Shougeki

Got it from "Buy-IT2000 " in germany.

They dont seem to have any up atm. Try some other german sellers

All delivered fine, but CentOS on the 250, put 4x2TB drives in, installed some crap and all roesy

Raiser

That last cashback form expired at end of last month - Any updated one?

Ta

howamidifferent

Just in case anyone hasnt been keeping up with other threads on these Microservers, its been shown by many that they work just great with 2 x 8GB sticks to allow 16GB ram.

Few examples:

http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=958208&page=420

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1038692703&postcount=628





Edit: Heres a link to list of known working and not working modules.

http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showpost.php?p=14387951&postcount=6206

Yakuza

Is the cashback offer still on? I'd be interested in putting one together to use as a media server.

NeoRox

Yeah its still on, well until the 31st May anyway.

You will find a link to the form on this page Link

extremehalo

Is the offer going to be extended again, like previous months??

Raiser

extremehalo wrote: »

Is the offer going to be extended again, like previous months??

+1?

davemie

Looks like it was extended until 30 June 2012 and the cashback was also increased to €140

http://www.hpshop.ie/Microserver.pdf

Surfn

is it possible to have 5 hard drives + an ssd for the OS in the microserver. are there 6 sata ports and room for an ssd somewhere

mcgovern

Surfn wrote: »

is it possible to have 5 hard drives + an ssd for the OS in the microserver. are there 6 sata ports and room for an ssd somewhere

In the old one at least, 4 sata ports and 1 for a DVD drive you could re-purpose. But you could use a USB stick for the OS if you are using some of Linux flavours. I have FreeNas running off a USB stick no problem.

Surfn

mcgovern wrote: »

In the old one at least, 4 sata ports and 1 for a DVD drive you could re-purpose. But you could use a USB stick for the OS if you are using some of Linux flavours. I have FreeNas running off a USB stick no problem.

i thought you could have 6 drives on the n40l, say 5, 2 or 3tb drives and an ssd for the OS. as far as i know there are 4 sata of the sas connection, there is another single sata port for an optical drive then you have the esata on the back. which in total is 6. i think there is a bios mod to enable hidden features where you can enable 3Gbps. this machine for 280 on dabs and 140 cashback ya cant go wrong

carbsy

Surfn wrote: »

. this machine for 280 on dabs and 140 cashback ya cant go wrong

I have one of the first gen ones and was going to grab another for my lab but I don't see it for €280 on Dabs.ie? Only €336.74? See here.

54kroc

carbsy wrote: »

I have one of the first gen ones and was going to grab another for my lab but I don't see it for €280 on Dabs.ie? Only €336.74? See here.

The one in your link is showing up at €280 for me.

carbsy

54kroc wrote: »

The one in your link is showing up at €280 for me.

Strange.Might be some cookie? It's €336.74 for me in 3 different browsers - two which I'm sure have never navigated to that page.

gnolan

54kroc wrote: »

The one in your link is showing up at €280 for me.

carbsy wrote: »

Strange.Might be some cookie? It's €336.74 for me in 3 different browsers - two which I'm sure have never navigated to that page.

€336 for me too

54kroc

I just went through to the checkout with it and it showed up at €336.74 for me too.