Geeky Goodness. The HP N40L Microserver thread.

Monsta_AU

Monsta_AU

...can I interest you in some vintage blades?
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Well, I have finally caved into the hype and decided to pony up for one of these little beauties.

Basically you get what is a fully fledged server in a box that is smaller than what Nathan packs your new shave gear in from Mensbiz. A relatively underpowered CPU, 2Gb of RAM and a 4-bay hard disk cage (and a 250GB disk) makes this thing very good value for $280. You can fit either a DVD drive and a lower-powered video card to turn it into a HTPC, or a 4x2.5" Hard disk cage into the 5.25" bay for even more storage, and then cheap SAS host card, and run something like FreeNAS on it and turn it insto a NAS/Fileserver.

Where I am headed with it is VMware - doing some training at the moment for work. Will put another $250 into a P410 RAID card so I can get the full benefit from VMware. Total spend thus far is $375 including the server and two sticks of Kingston ECC unregistered RAM.

Massive threads all over the internet, including OCAU. Anybody else bought one?
 
Yup - me.

Even better here at the moment - until the end of November there's £100 cashback (off a purchase price of £250)...

Been mucking around with it to see how low I can get the power draw to go - down to 25W at idle now - even tanking along at full bore it's still less than 75W.

Dead quiet too.

Drives I've stuck in are all donors from other external enclosures I already had around the house - when the gouging stops I'll replace some of the smaller drives with 2TB monsters.
 
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Yes, we have people here buying the 3TB external USB drives and pulling out Hitachi 7K3000's for $190, but if you want an OEM drive that will cost you $399!!!! Not paying that, but will fill it up with 3TB drives once prices go back to kind of normal. I have 4x 2TB Hitachi's at work which I am going to appropriate :)

At this stage I want to retire my Q9550 box which is only really storage and Torrents, and will plug in a USB disk into it, pass with through VMware and into a VM of a very stripped back Win7 for Browsing/mail/torrents.

Did you fit the PicoPSU? Getting some good feedback on that.
 
I'm clearly geek-fail.

(No, not at all... you have enough cred to buy one. Just check out the OCAU thread)
 
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Nah, it's exactly as I received it bar the addition of a 2TB, 1TB and 500GB drive... so 3.75TB spinning. For my needs (bit of overnight downloading from the BBC iPlayer, DLNA server serving the results) it's perfectly adequate as it stands.
 
For that sort of a level it is pretty good. What OS are you running? WHS 2011?

My only issue is that I need to be able to present a proper array to ESXi so I need to get the P410 card into it also. Have to be very careful with hardware once you go for ESXi.
 
Maybe I need to think about getting one of these.

I've been content with WFS through Tversity via DNLA across my network BUT - a very big BUT - Tversity doesn't suffer MKV easily. In fact, any large res file jitters and stalls. Forget VOBs as they aren't even recognised.

I did use my 360 for the media player, again with content stored on my main pc, but new tv has WiFi and DNLA so the 360 is redundant. Maybe I will even play a game on it one day.

Though from the specs, I could just use an older Athlon box with 2GB dual channel and dump a heap of drives in it, run it as a headless box and achieve the same thing.

Except these Hp's have such a good rep and the noise and power usage is exceptional.
 
These will do MKV's quite happily. Most run XMBC straight out, throw a GT210 in and run the sound out via HDMI. You will need to enable offloading for x.264 though. Some run internal tuners, some run USB.

There's an epic thread at OCAU. Took me 4 hours to get halfway through it. There is a spreadsheet of what people are running in them too, might give you a few ideas.
 
Razormonsta said:
For that sort of a level it is pretty good. What OS are you running? WHS 2011?
Click to expand...

Ubuntu - not even running "special" version - just the regular desktop stuff, although I've made a few tweaks to the hard drive parameters to allow for a better balance of power consumption. Using PS3MediaServer as my DLNA source...

Just ordered a GigE switch and Wireless-N AP for additional geek satisfaction... oh and I'll be pulling a couple more Cat6 cables in at the weekend too to get the GigE to "new" places.

JugV2 said:
Except these Hp's have such a good rep and the noise and power usage is exceptional.
Click to expand...

The noise from mine is drowned out by the noise from the boiler which is through 2 closed doors and across the landing from me... SWMBO has complained more about the noise of my typing than the noise from the device (which she hasn't complained about at all).

My only complaint is the death laser brightness of the "health" LED - lights the room at night!
 
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I remember people going on about these a little while ago while I was researching a NAS. I ended up just going with a QNAP NAS that does everything I need - storage (RAID), Twonky Media Server and Transmission BitTorrent client. Plenty of other stuff you can do with them as well. I even have a few apps on my Android phone that connect to my NAS.
Most rooms in my house have a network point so I run a Billion 7800N ADSL2+ router with an an extra 8-port gigabit switch in a cupboard, all hooked up to an UPS.
 
I think they were looking for only the barest minimum of light during the day and nothing too bright at night.

Someone also mentioned the blue painters tape. They said it keeps the nice blue shade but definitely keeps the light amount down. I think they said they used 8 layers though!

EDIT: Scored a P212 card for $56 delivered. These do RAID 1, 1, 0+1 standard, and Raid 5 with a BBWC. Need to find myself a battery!
 
Good news! Work has seen fit to purchase me another Microserver. So I will have not one, but TWO! Perfect for doing VMware lab work. Just need to find some shared storage so I can vMotion and do some other cool things.
 
I picked up my two Microservers from EYO this morning. After a small stuffup with the RAM (I ordered the wrong kit with one) I have them in the car and will break them out tonight to install ESXi and a few other bits. Expect photos later tonight!

Just thinking that I need to get a decent network switch to run these off, especially since I want to run multiple vSwitches and ports out of VMware. This means something capable of switching VLANs and trunking. I haven't played with the HP switches yet, and they are usually pretty cheap.
 
If you're looking at VLAN then you need managed switches.

Something decent, not HP or Alloy, get Cisco if you can.

Bit pricey though. That's what we use for linking networks remotely, VLAN, that sort of thing.
 
There's nothing wrong with the HP switches at all, they are eating the Cisco's in the marketplace as Cisco continually prices their stuff at a ridiculous premium. I have a few clients on them and they work very well and are easy to configure and generally work with.

I have been working with some Juniper Switches with a client, they are good but fiddly to get the configuration right. I would not choose them in most situations.

The HP's will do the job, plus they are quite cheap for what they do. I do own a 48-port Linksys SRW-2048 switch which will do the job but that is just overkill. I need about 8 ports that I can VLAN... the rest can go back into the 4 ports on the router.
 
Well - I spotted a deal too good to be true... 8GB RAM for it for £30 (inc delivery by tomorrow allegedly - if not Monday) - so that's en route now.

The small/midrange HP switches are excellent value for money - often on promotion and the resellers seem to have quite a flexible offer on the price too... not having to buy a software support to get updates is a bonus too.
 
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Is that the ECC UDIMM's Hunny or is it plain DDR3?

I paid £66 equivalent for my 8GB of Kingston Unregistered ECC, so yes that sounds like a very good deal.

I am off to find a couple of USB sticks to install ESXi to.....
 
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