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By Tikanderoga
Hi all
Long time lurker.
I've been running a G7 and now a G10 MS with Esxi 5.5, now 6.7 i think, and I'm getting tired of it. It then is a Server 2012R2, running my files and media content.
Also in the fray is an LSI 9210 Raid controller. Used to run Raid 5, but the raid kept degrading and I had to run the software to configure from a bare metal installation or rebuild from the menu, meaning the raid was more in rebuild than in actual use.
I'm thinking about going bare metal, install Server 2016 and backup the whole stuff regularly to an external NAS, which I've been doing for the past 20 months as it is already with Veeam.
In case of need for a VM, i've been thinking of firing up HyperV. I know Gen10 doesn't support pass through, so that's one of the main reasons to de-virtualise.
Also thinking about removing the Raid card in the process, going back to stock gear.
Thoughts and suggestions?
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By Dave
Panos Panay just wowed the Microsoft crowd with two incredible hardware reveals. The first was the SurfaceBook i7 with a whopping 16 hours of battery life. The second was Surface Studio. I dare you to call it an "All in One" after today.
I'll be chatting about all this gear on my new podcast, RESET. Find it here: mccabe.io
Surface Studio
The specs of Studio are impressive but visually it is stunning. It has 28" of wow that can be manipulated to however you prefer to create.
Screen: 28" PixelSense Display
Resolution: 4500 x 3000 (192 DPI)
Color settings: Adobe sRGB, DCI-P3 and Vivid Color Profiles, Individually color calibrated
Touch: 10-point multi-touch
Aspect Ratio: 3:2
Surface Pen
Zero Gravity Hinge
Quad-core 6th Gen Intel Core i5 or i7
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 965M 2GB GPU GDDR5 memory or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M 4GB GPU GDDR5 memory
It looks like a creative persons dream machine. Apple picked a bad week to follow Microsoft when it comes to hardware reveals. I personally would like to try the Studio and Dial with some video editing software. I think it will be great for that.
Look at the Microsoft Store online for more photos. It really is a nice looking Surface. Link Here.
Surface Book
The Surface Book is plain and simple; More. More graphics and more battery. It's a little heavier and starts at 3.6 pounds where last year's Surface Book was 3.3 pounds. Maybe it's the new 6th Gen Intel Core i7 or the i7: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 965M with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. That's nice but Panos stated they just put in more battery! It's nice to see that. Adds a little weight but for those that want the battery life it's a welcome change.
Surface Dial
The Dial is impressive. It's compatible with any Windows 10 enabled PC, laptop, or tablet as long as it has the Anniversary Update. Don't try this with your Surface Pro but it will stick to the screen of the Surface Studio! It will have optimized off screen compatibility with Surface Book and SP4.
It's a jog dial on steroids and Panos and software partners demo'd many uses of it. Color wheel, zoom in, etc. It's $99 and can be purchased now for delivery on November 10th.
Thanks for shopping with my links. Maybe I can get one too!
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By Amit
Greetings Gents,
I am trying to build a home lab for the purposes of learning the virtualization technologies - WS 2012 R2 Hyper-V / VMware ESX / Citrix XenServer and for this purpose, I have just purchased (with my limited knowledge in server hardware)1 HP Prolient ML10v2 with Xeon E3-1220 v3, 8 Gigs of RAM, Single 1 TB HDD. I am also planning to buy more ML10v2 servers, (if ML10v2 server can fulfil my requirement of implementing these virtualization solutions and can run couple of VMs per host).
My question to the community is whether has anyone successfully installed/ran these solution off this server? if yes, what are the considerations for installing VMware ESX/Citrix XenServer that one must keep in mind?
If the ML10v2 hardware is not capable of installing/running/hosting these bare metal solutions (VMware/XenServer) than what is the minimum hardware requirement to be considered before purchasing another server. Please consider the fact that this is a home lab and I have limited budget of around 1000-1500 USD (500 already spent) and have to meet the needs first and wants later.
Consider me a newbie here and if I have missed any information to be provided, please let me know. Any help/advice is much appreciated, Thanks in advance.
Regards
Amit
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By noober69
Hi, I have a new ML10v2 and am trying to consolidate all my servers onto this little box as much as possible.
I currently actively use:
HTPC server (N54L win 10, 8TB of movies and tv shows, networked to my smart TV that runs a Kodi app). Runs about 12hr/day and doesn't do anything but serve up HQ MKV files (ie 10gb 1080p movies).
Home server (N54L WHS2011, 8 TB of backup data for client windows pc's. Data for backup is mainly family photos and video, but could include some of my movie library. Also used for bitorrent and usenet client.) Runs 24/7, and is slow.
I have win 10 laptop and desktop which I use for work and play, so the servers do not get used for games, watching vids etc.
Requirements for new ML10v2 server:
Consolidate functions as above.
Maintain OS and data backups of 2 windows client pc's.
Hold and serve video files for Kodi across my GB lan network.
Run SABNZBD+ for d/l media. Maybe also some torrenting which I do infrequently.
Would be on 24/7 and would need to do several things at once.
New ML10v2 has 16gb ram, intel G3240 dual core, ~10tb HDD (before I scavenge the old N54L drives), and a M1015 giving me about 8-10 HDD connections. I am thinking of a low end xeon (1220) and a dual port intel nic as well.
I have put Xpenology on the ML10v2 for a play and it seems to sync client data and serve movies to the tv well. I like its interface and it seems it could take care of SAB, and torrents. Not sure if that can be done all at once, which it would need to do. Probably can't do Windows OS backups and not sure about proper data backups of photos etc.
So I am thinking I would like to have my ML10v2 act as a single server to replace the 2 N54L boxes.
I have a dreamspark license so I believe I can get Windows Server 2012 R2 in any flavour for free. I would prefer not to spend money on licenses if I don't have to, but want something reliable. I currently remote into each box via client pc/laptop for management.
My initial thoughts:
Option 1: install exsi on the bare ML10v2, then install Xpenology as a VM. Also install Win Sever 2012 (or win 10/whs2011 at a pinch) as another VM for OS backups.
Option 2: Install Win Server 2012 baremetal (or win 10?) with Hyper-V and then install Xpenology on top as a VM.
I want the lowest maintenance solution. I am not sure how hard the above is to setup and maintain. I am also not sure whether the system could handle all these tasks anyway, so I seek advice.
I have set up my system myself and tweaked it and everything works fine. I have limited knowledge of Linux, and no understanding of VM. I do not work in IT as a job, so solutions that require registry hacks, knowledge of CLI commands etc are not going to be easy for me to use.
I could just keep 2/3 different servers but I would prefer to consolidate into one box if possible.
Thanks.
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By artiom
Hi all,
Here is some info I would like to share about running Windows from USB drive on a server.
As usual, I am not responsible if you destroy your server using anything described here!
A while ago, I was running Hyper-V 2012 R2 from an USB drive on HP MS G8 for more than a year - despite many people claiming that USB drives are not reliable.
I disabled the page file and was using a more-or-less recommended flash drive - Kingston Datatraveler Ultimage G3.
The disk performance of host os was limited to the internal USB2 port, however all HDDs were free for VMs and Storage Services.
At some point, I decided to use rack-mounted servers, as 16GB RAM limit on HP MS G8 was too low for me.
Long story short, I got 2 servers in the garage and installed the full Windows Server 2012 R2 OS - mainly for the amazing data deduplication feature of Storage Services.
As a full OS can wear a flash drive much quicker (I am running them with GUI enabled), I decided to use something more reliable than a simple flash drive. As I did not want to spend money for USB SSD drives (like Kingston HyperX?), I went to a much cheaper route - I got the cheapest mSATA SSD drive (Intel SSD 310 @40GB) and the cheapest mSATA-to-USB adapter. Well, the cheapest adapter didn't work on my laptop but did work on the server, so the second one was a little bit more expensive - by ~50p. In total one enclosure with a SSD drive costed me ~30GBP.
Then, I migrated the installed OS to the SSD - and this is the tricky part. I did the following:
1. Attached the SSD-in-USB-enclosure drive to the destination port on the server and all further actions were performed on the server via RDP.
2. Partitioned the destination drive according to MSDN recommendations:
a. UEFI server: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn898510%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
b. MBR server: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn898504%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
3. Captured the live server OS in a VHDX with Disc2vhd tool: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
4. Mounted the captured VHDX file, assigned a drive letter to the OS partition and removed the letters from others (the tool captures them as RAW partitions even if you unchedk them from capture process).
5. Mounted the SYSTEM hive from OS on the VHD drive: http://smallvoid.com/article/winnt-offline-registry-edit.html
6. Updated the driver loading flags to load USB drivers on boot (otherwise you get BSOD when loading from USB): http://blog.frankovic.net/2010/06/install-windows-server-2008-r2-or-windows-7-on-usb-stick/
However, by trial and error, I found that the article above does not specify the needer path for the flags key and to make it work I had to edit the key at the following location: <LOADED SYSTEM>\HardwareConfig\<some guid>
7. Removed the information about drive letters from original HDD, otherwise the OS boots from a drive different than C but certain system files get loaded from C anyway and all this leads to weird errors: http://windowsitpro.com/windows-client/changing-windows-system-drive-letter
8. Captured the OS image into a WIM file (yes, without sysprep): https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn898498%28v=vs.85%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396
9. Depending whether the server is UEFI or MBR, the following was done to make it boot:
a. UEFI server: use bcdboot tool and force UEFI boot configuration. I had a few automatic repairs and reboots after, but all worked in the end.
b. MBR server: use bcdboot tool with default parameters and then use bootsect tool to fix the MBR boot record. All worked from the first try.
10. Booted the OS and verified that it indeed uses the new USB SSD.
11. Using bcdboot tool enabled the hypervisor launch (it is disabled in default configuration): http://blogs.interfacett.com/enabling-hypervisor-auto-start-boot-configuration-database-bcd
According to general recommendations, the page file was not disabled.
General recommendations:
0. DO NOT delete or alter or change or touch or do anything with the original OS HDD until you boot everything from USB SSD and set up backup and make sure it works and you are happy with it! You've been warned!
1. Set up backup asap and make sure you can restore it.
2. Have a Windows Deployment Services server running in the network - it is really helpful when you need to load Windows PE to fix broken boot records.
3. Have running all necessary remote tools - like iDRAC console on Dell, iLO on HP or iKVM/IPMI on Supermicro to avoid running around with monitors and keyboards. It is much more fun to do everything from your sofa.
For me, all is working fine so far - I will post here if I will encounter any issues or find some more interesting information.
I hope this information will be helpful to someone.
Thank you for reading!
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