HP ProLiant G7 Server N54L Shell Shocker $229.99 1pm-3pm
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By Taztaztic
Hi all,
I am new to the server world (please be gentle) and I desperately need some help!
I recently acquired a HP MicroServer Gen8. Bays 1 & 2 have 1TB SSD each and I believe they are setup in a RAID 1 config (not sure how to check) and have windows server 2012 installed.
Bays 3 & 4 are empty and I recently purchased a 4TB WD Blue Hard Drive and managed to install windows 10 onto it via a separate computer.
I've now inserted the 4TB Hard drive into bay 3 and want windows 10 to load up, but its not doing that....it keeps loading up windows server 2012 thats in bays 1/2 hard drives.
How can I choose which bay to boot windows from? I like it to boot from Bay 3 most of the time that has windows 10.
In normal computers, it was simple to organise the boot order via BIOS, but with the Gen8 its seems very complex with HP's own BIOS...etc and it's starting to give me a headache!
Any help from anyone will be really appreciated!
A simple easy to follow instructions will suffice.
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By E3000
Hello all,
A few questions for those who use Type-1 Hypervisors on their Gen8 MicroServers...
I am looking to try ESXi or ProxMox and have been reading a lot of the threads on here.
Hopefully you guys can help with some harder to find answers I have been seeking.
1) Which would be the better way to setup ProxMox:
a) Hypervisor on Internal MicroSD, VMs installed on SSD in ODD Port, Data on 4x HDDs in bays.
b) Hypervisor on Internal USB, VMs installed on SSD in ODD Port, Data on 4x HDDs in bays.
c) Hypervisor and VMs both installed on same SSD (partitioned?) in ODD Port, Data on 4x HDDs in bays.
d) Hypervisor on SSD using a USB-to-SATA cable on Internal USB, VMs installed on separate SSD in ODD Port, Data on 4x HDDs in bays.
2) Would a 128GB SSD be a ‘waste‘ for installing a Hypervisor on? How much space is typically needed?
3) How many VMs have you guys run on a Gen8 comfortably without it being sluggish?
4) Everyone seems to be going RAID crazy these days. Is there any reason to use it if high-availability is not that necessary and a good backup plan is in place? What is wrong with separate disks (or singular Raid0s)?
5) Does using Type-1 Hypervisors have any effect on the internal fans speed/noise? Is it possible to have 3-5 VMs running and still have the fan speed @~8% as it was when I was using 2 nested (Type-2) VMs?
Sorry in advance if some of these questions are silly, common knowledge, or “depends on what you are doing in the VMs!” 😆
Thanks in advance to all those that help!
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By dxzdxz1
This is my first post here but I've been lurking in this forum for quite sometime now, and from what I understand, the only reason that we couldn't achieve 32gb ram on the Microserver Gen8 was because there was no 16gb unbuffered ecc ram available before.
I was searching for a memory module meeting this criteria and I found this one. My question is, letting aside this ridiculous price, is there any compatibility issue that could make this ram won't work on the Microserver Gen8?
Most of the threads here about memory compatibility are quite old and I didn't want to revive an old thread just to ask this, so I'm creating this one.
Thanks in advance.
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By radaxian
Hi all,
Here's a guide I would like to share around Windows Storage spaces and creating a 4x drive Parity pool
In a nutshell I have Windows Serer 2019 and storage space parity pool running very nicely on my Gen8. Here's the configuration I used and How to copy my setup.
(I still believe ZFS or UnRAID are far better choice as a filesystem on these limited servers, but if you need Windows like I do, then storage spaces can be an excellent alternative.)
This is my "best effort" guide and by no means perfect. It does however yield excellent results for both read and write speeds.
Gen8 Microserver
16GB RAM
CPU Stock for now (1270 V3 on it's way)
Disks 4x 3TB WD NAS drives in front bays
SSD - Samsung Evo 850 265
First lesson, DONT use the Windows GUI to create the pool or Virtual disk as the GUI applies terrible defaults that you can't edit and will ruin performance. Also make sure you're on the latest version of Windows server as a LOT has changed and been improved recently.
You must use PowerShell.
Terms:
PhysicalDiskRedundancy - Parity Columns - 4 (The data segments stripped to disks. Should match your 4 disks) Interleve - 256K (The amound of data written to each "column" or disk. In this case 256KB interleave gives us a 64K write to each disk) LogicalSectorSize - 4096 PhysicalSectorSize - 4096 REFS/NTFS Cluster - 64K
Overall configuration:
4 drive file system, one bootable SSD in RAID mode.
BIOS setup initial
F9 into the BIOS and set the B120i controller into RAID mode
F5 into the RAID manager and create 1 individual RAID0 logical drive for the SSD
Set the SSD as the preferred boot drive (Yes in the same screen)
Set the cluster size to 63
Enable caching
Windows install
Install Windows 2019 Server Standard GUI edition from ISO
Offer up the B120i RAID drivers via a USB stick so the wizard can see the SSD RAID0 drive. Filename p033111.exe (Have them extracted)
Windows update and patch and reboot
BIOS setup post windows
Once windows is up and running go back into the F5 RAID manager and finish the setup of the 4 front drives into 4x RAID0
Check the SSD is still set as the preferred boot drive (Yes in the same screen)
Set the cluster size to 63
Windows config of storage spaces
At this point you should see 4 individual drives ready to be used as a Storage pool
Try to set each disk to have a cache (Not all drives support this)
Win + X to open the side menu
Device Manager
Expand Disk Drives
Right Click the "HP Logical Volume" for each drive
Check - "Enable write caching on the device"
(If it doesn't work don't stress, it's optional but nice to have)
Powershell - Run as Admin
Determine the physical drisks available for the pool we're about to create
Get-PhysicalDisk | ft friendlyname, uniqueid, mediatype, size -auto
Your output will look something like this, so identify the 4 drives that are the same and take note of their uniqueID
Mine are the bottom four drives all 3TB in size
friendlyname uniqueid size
------------ -------- ----
SSD
HP LOGICAL VOLUME 600508B1001C5C7A1716CCDD5A706248 250023444480
HP LOGICAL VOLUME 600508B1001CAC8AFB32EE6C88C5530D 3000559427584
HP LOGICAL VOLUME 600508B1001C51F9E0FF399C742F83A6 3000559427584
HP LOGICAL VOLUME 600508B1001C2FA8F3E8856A2BF094A0 3000559427584
HP LOGICAL VOLUME 600508B1001CDBCE168F371E1E5AAA23 3000559427584
Rename the friendly name based on the UniqueID from above and set to "HDD type"
Set-Physicaldisk -uniqueid "Your UniqueID" -newFriendlyname Disk1 -mediatype HDD
You will need to run that 4 times with each UniqueID code and create a new friendly name for each drive. I called mine "Drive 1, Drive 2" etc
Set-Physicaldisk -uniqueid "600508B1001C2FA8F3E8856A2BF094A0" -newFriendlyname Disk1 -mediatype HDD Set-Physicaldisk -uniqueid "600508B1001CDBCE168F371E1E5AAA23" -newFriendlyname Disk2 -mediatype HDD Set-Physicaldisk -uniqueid "600508B1001CAC8AFB32EE6C88C5530D" -newFriendlyname Disk3 -mediatype HDD Set-Physicaldisk -uniqueid "600508B1001C51F9E0FF399C742F83A6" -newFriendlyname Disk4 -mediatype HDD
Verify the disks have been set correctly
The following example shows which physical disks are available in the primordial server and CAN be used in the new Pool. You're just checking here if the friendly name renaming worked and they are all set to HDD type. Primordial just means on your local server and available.
Get-StoragePool -IsPrimordial $true | Get-PhysicalDisk | Where-Object CanPool -eq $True You should see your four drives with nice names that you set like "Disk1"
Now find out your sub system name, as we need this for the next command. Just take note of it. Example "Windows Storage on <servername>"
Mine is ""Windows Storage on Radaxian"
Get-StorageSubSystem
The following example creates a new storage pool named "Pool1" that uses all available disks and sets the cluster size.
New-StoragePool -FriendlyName Pool1 -StorageSubsystemFriendlyName "Windows Storage on Radaxian" -PhysicalDisks (Get-PhysicalDisk -CanPool $True) -LogicalSectorSizeDefault 64KB
Now create the Virtual Disk on the new pool with 4x disks and Partity set correctly. (This is critical to do via PowerShell)
New-VirtualDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName "Pool1" -FriendlyName "VDisk1" -ResiliencySettingName Parity -NumberOfDataCopies 1 -NumberOfColumns 4 -ProvisioningType Fixed -Interleave 256KB -UseMaximumSize Those two commands should complete without error, if they don't go back and check your syntax
Go back into the Windows GUI and open this
Server Manager\File and Storage Services\Servers
You should see the Storage pool listed and the Virtual disk we created in the previous steps.
Storage pool - Pool1
Virtual Disk - VDisk1
Select Disks in the GUI
Identify your new VDisk1 and right click it.
Set to Online, this will also set it to use a GPT boot record
On the same screen in the below pane Volumes
Click TASKS and select "New Volume"
Select REFS and Sector size of 64K
Enter a volume name like "Volume1" or whatever you want to call it
Select a drive letter such as Z
(You can use NTFS here for slightly better performance, but I'm sticking to REFS as it has some benefits)
You'll now have a Storage pool, Virtual disk on top and a volume created with optimal settings
Go back into Power Shell
Enable power protected status if applicable (Just try it, no harm)
(Ideally here you should have your server connected to a basic UPS to protect it from power outages)
Set-StoragePool -FriendlyName Pool1 -IsPowerProtected $True
Check if the new sector sizes of Virtual disk and all relevant settings are correct
Get-VirtualDisk | ft FriendlyName, ResiliencySettingName, NumberOfColumns, Interleave, PhysicalDiskRedundancy, LogicalSectorSize, PhysicalSectorSize Example output
FriendlyName ResiliencySettingName NumberOfColumns Interleave PhysicalDiskRedundancy LogicalSectorSize PhysicalSectorSize
VDisk1 Parity 4 262144 1 4096 4096
You're done.... enjoy the new Volume.
At this point you can share out your new Volume "Z" and allow client computers to connect.
Some other commands in Power Shell that I found useful
Get more verbose disk details around sectors.
Get-VirtualDisk -friendlyname Vdisk1 | fl
Get-PhysicalDisk | select FriendlyName, Manufacturer, Model, PhysicalSectorSize, LogicalSectorSize | ft
Check if TRIM is enabled. This output should be 0
fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify If TRIM is not enabled, you can set it on with these commands
fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify ReFS 0 fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify NTFS 0
Check the Power Protected status and cache
Get-StorageAdvancedProperty -PhysicalDisk (Get-PhysicalDisk)[0]
Once your data has been migrated back to your new pool from backup, make sure you run this command to "spread out the data" properly.
This command rebalances the Spaces allocation for all of the Spaces in the pool named SQLPool.
Optimize-StoragePool -FriendlyName "Pool1"
I'm yet to get my Xeon in the mail, but once that's installed I think the disk performance will go up even higher as the stock CPU is junk.
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By Gulftown
As I have decided to make some improvements on my afermarket fan controller I am trying to try implementing thermal control or mobo PWM control of additional fans, but before that I'm in a great need to inderstand how much fan count the controller should be ready to support. As this forum doesn't support polls I have nothing to do but ask you to reply on this topic.
What I would be thankful to know:
1. How many fans have you installed in your Microserver.
2. What fans do you use (size, 3/4-pin connector) and where are they located, also what are they cooling.
3. What way do you power these fans?
Thank you in advance for your feedback!
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