Thanks to a homeservershow forum member keeping track of prices I ordered the HP Gen8 Microserver 1610T … of course, nobody wants to run VMWare on a Celeron so obviously the first thing to try is installing a Xeon processor.
Update April 12, 2020. The 8th Gen HP Microserver is outdated. If you have one it probably still runs great. But if making a new purchase you may want to consider the newer 10th Gen HP Microservers.
Original post below in case you’re still interested in this mod:
Installing the Xeon E3-1230 V2 in the Microserver
The HP Microserver’s CPU is passively cooled and the heatsink is rated for a max TDP of 35W, and there’s no port on the motherboard that I could find for an extra CPU fan.
The obvious option is the Xeon E3-1220L V2 at 17W, but it’s expensive and hard to find and only has 2 cores.
I already have a Xeon E3-1230 V2 (69W), and for most people this is a better option because it’s readily available and affordable. I figure worse case I could disable two of the four cores to bring it down to 35W.
I’ve never applied thermal paste, so I’m not sure if that’s the right amount, but that’s how much I did.
First Boot…
Hey, it worked!
I thought it wise to at least go into the BIOS and disable 3.7GHz Turbo, so the max we’ll hit is 3.3GHz. (Update: I later learned that disabling Turbo isn’t necessary. The CPU will only go into Turbo when a single core is being utilized so TDP would be low anyway).
VMware ESXi booted just fine (I used the version provided by HP). Now I’ve got hyper-threading and VT-d (Direct Path I/O) on a Gen8 Microserver!
And the temperature is doing just fine…
CPU Load Test
10 minutes full load using “stress” on a VM. All four cores clocking in at 3.292GHz. You can see the temperatures bumped up but still within specifications. Fan was still running at 51%. Temperature inside my house is currently 84F so if it can survive a full load in this heat I’m not concerned about it running into problems.
Compatible Processors
(added July 28, 2013)
Here’s a list of processors I think would be good candidates. I’ve excluded the Core i5 series because they don’t support ECC.
The stock processor does not differ from the i3 except for clock speed and hyper-threading, so I don’t think it’s worth the money to upgrade to an i3.
The main reasons to upgrade to a Xeon is the AES instruction set, VT-d, or more cores and a faster clock speed. I think the best value is the Xeon E3-1230 V2.
Thanks a lot for your post. I also bought the G8 Microserver and there is pretty much zero information about CPU upgrades on this server (every blog just mentions its possible to upgrade but no one actually did it).
Your blog finally answered my question and I will proceed with the upgrade.
Filip,
Thanks for the comment! Glad it helped, if you do it on yours let me know what processor you use. BTW, I use ILO4 for the console so I have no idea if the video still works with the Xeon E3 since it doesn’t have onboard graphics (I don’t have a VGA monitor to test). The motherboard is based on the C204 chipset so in theory these processors should be compatible (obviously look at max TDP): http://ark.intel.com/products/52804/Intel-BD82C204-PCH, but I did notice at the bottom of Supermicro’s C204 they suggest not using an E3 with onboard graphics (E3-xxx5 series): http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon/c202_c204/x9scm-f.cfm I have no idea if that limitation is specific to Supermicro’s implementation or if the same applies to the motherboard used in the Gen8 Microserver.
Thanks for your comment as well. I just ordered the same one as you have (E3-1230 v2) since the slightly cheaper E3-1220 v2 is not worth it (price/performance ratio due to 4C/4H). I wish I could use the version 3 Xeons but I think they are not socket compatible (1155 vs 1150). I am also thinking about upgrading the heatsink with something low profile like the Noctua NH-L9i (if it fits) and power it from the P3 cable intended for the optical SATA drive that I don’t need.
Just wondering, did you buy the iLO essentials license for your G8 server to get it up the console running?
I must have messed up my trial because it now says no license is installed, I was in the BIOS looking at all the settings and I know I adjusted the clock so maybe that invalidated the trial license. What’s interesting is with no license installed I can still get access to the console for 40 seconds at a time, then it will kick me out with “An iLO Advanced License is required for continued use after server startup.”, but as far as I can tell I can reconnect as often as I want for 40 seconds at a time. I can even connect for 40 seconds from the Android App.
One thing that does require the Advanced ILO license is remotely mounting media or an ISO file from your computer. There is no DVD drive with the server, so with no ILO4 license the only way to mount media is to physically plug a USB flash (or USB DVD drive if you have one) into the server and boot off of it.
I don’t want to mess with that so I bought an ILO Advanced 1-year subscription off of ebay, you can get them for around $35 and I think they work with ILO4. I haven’t actually tried entering the key yet so I don’t know that it works, my plan is to not activate it until I need it because chances or I will go a year or two without needing to remotely mount media.
If you do install a fan let me know how it goes, I may do the same thing. I don’t know of an alternative but the fan will always go at the same speed with the P3 cable, there’s no temperature / fan speed control, are you going to try to throttle it down so it’s not always running at full speed?
I am back with an update. I have finally received the E3-1230 v2 (box version) and it took me maybe 10 minutes to install it (the old heatsink was a bit stuck).
I have disabled the turbo option as 3.3 GHz is more then enough juice for my needs and I don’t see any issue with the stock HP passive heatsink yet.
Btw, your blog is probably the only one on the net that describes the CPU upgrade – thanks again for being the first one to try it :-).
I will let you know once I obtain the iLO license as I am waiting for the dedicated HP PS1810-8G switch for this small beast.
Cheers,
Filip
Hi, Filip! Thanks so much for the update! Always glad to be on the bleeding edge, I’m getting a lot of hits for this post, I probably should put some ads up. |:-) If you get that switch can you try out teaming the Network adapters in the Microserver? One thing I’ve always wanted to do is team the gigabit NICs on my desktop and the server and see if I can get around 150MBps transfer rates between them.
Thanks,
Ben
Hello,
I believe you are right that updating the clock after installing the ILO4 license will cause the license to expire.
So I think the best solution is to use the 40 second free access to set the clock before entering the license for the first time.
I did as you did and had my license expire, but you can reset the iLO to factory defaults which will restore you ability to enter a trial code. This page
describes the reset, and option 4 can be performed via the iLO itself (the 40 second timeout doesn’t seem to apply until after the machine fully starts up).
This will reset the login to factory default, but you can then re-apply your trial license.
Good info, thanks!
Well, it isn’t just an explicit time reset that clears the demo license.
I reset the the iLO to factory defaults and reinstalled my demo license. I then installed an OS and began to set things up. A day or so later the license had expired again.
The only thing I can see is that at every power up (can’t recall if wall power was removed or if this was just an OS reboot, I was moving the server around so it might have been the former) I see:
On-board clock set; was 01/01/1970 00:09:17.
This entry shows up 3 times, then 13 hours after the third occurrence I get:
License expired.
But this was only a day after the initial license install (and less than a week after it was generated at HP’s web site). The license didn’t truly expire, but for some reason the iLO thinks it did.
For now I haven’t reinstalled it as I’ve got the host basically set up. I do have an iLO advanced license I bought on Amazon for about $40, but I am hesitant to install it as I don’t know if the same thing will happen there.
Has anyone installed a non-demo license and had it persist (or even a demo one)?
Thanks.
That’s one thing I don’t like about ilo… The risk of dealing with licensing when your server goes down and you really need it.. Supermicro motherboards with ipmi don’t require any licensing.
Hi Ben, you can just install the license! After 1 year only the support expires! The license itself never expires neither do the functions you get with the license! :)
You have got to be kidding! I could have just installed the license and had it forever?!
Yes you could’ve already installed the license haha!
You can ask with HP but they’ll tell you the same thing, you pay for the license and after 1 year (or 3 depending on which you buy) only the support with HP expires but the functionality you get with the Advanced license will never expire!
So if you really want the HP support you’ll have to buy a new license again after 1 year, if you don’t care about that like me you can go ahead and install that license! :)
Well thanks for the info! I wish I’d known that earlier… I probably wouldn’t have sold my Microserver. I could care less about support–I just want to be able to install an OS remotely. Well, at least when the Gen9’s come out I’ll have a license I can apply. |:-)
Hi Ben!
Thanks for your post, it really got me going for Gen8. HP should send you a free server for this post, because I’m sure I’m not the only one who is thinking about buying because of your post.
I am planning on buying the cheapest version with the G1610T Celeron CPU (to make it at first cheap), so I try it out and upgrade to E3-1220L v2/v3 if more CPU is needed.
I’d have some questions:
1. Why are you thinking of a fan with the new CPU installed? Is it important?
2. Do you think this server will accept 2×16 RAM? Are you perhaps sure about this? By any chance do you know what kind of RAM would be the best in this case?
3. So you say that I can remote manage the server for 40 seconds per session forever, without buying a licence? (I can live with that) I understand that virtual disks cannot be mounted, just in the trial period, but that doesn’t matter.
4. Do you think virtualization is possible with the G1610T with VMware or Hyper-V? Just checking, because I just might not order the new CPU yet.
5. As a Gen8 owner, do you see any drawbacks of the server? I want to use it as a home media server, fileserver with bitlocker or other encryption, sync server to bittorrent sync etc. So many things come into mind :-)
Hi, Daniel. You’re welcome. I’ll take a free Microserver from HP any day! I agree, the G1610T is the way to go, the G2020T is marginally faster and probably only worth an extra $10.
1. For the fan I don’t think it’s necessary based on the temperatures I saw on my load test, but I like to do things by best practice when possible so if there’s a way to get a fan in cheaply it’s probably worth doing. In practice I don’t think it will be an issue, I know the server can take a full load for 10 minutes on a hot summer month and not overheat, and I also know that my load is light.
2. I don’t think so unless someone makes 16GB non-registered DIMMS, I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure the C204 motherboards require un-buffered (non-registered) memory and I haven’t seen any that are more than 8GB on the market (if someone finds some let me know). I bought two of these: http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=W8GE1600KI I only run ECC memory, maybe there is some non-ECC that would work for people that care less about data integrity. VMWare also helps alleviate this issue since you can balloon memory and swap onto an SSD.
3. Yes, as far as I can tell. So far it has let me connect a dozen times for 40 seconds at a time, and I can interact on the keyboard and such. I think it would be good enough to install an OS.
4. The G1610T is not your grandfather’s Celeron. It is very close in performance to an i3, and it does support virtualization. I ran VMWare on the G1610T before swapping the processor (I think you’ll be happier with VMWare, I’ve tried both and Hyper-V is not easy to setup, it really wants a domain controller, I finally got it to work without one and the disk performance on Ubuntu servers was considerably slower). I’ll post more details on my setup in the future, but on the HP Microserver N40L which is half the speed of the G1610T I’ve run a Napp-It All-in-one ZFS server for my RAID/NAS, shared the storage back to VMWare via NFS, and ran half a dozen Ubuntu VMs on top of it without issues. If you want to run a heavy database server or run 100 users off an Exchange server you might want the faster processor. The most important feature the Xeon E3 will give you on virtualization is VT-d which lets you pass a device (such as a RAID controller) directly to a virtual machine. This may or may not matter to you. Traditionally this was done for database servers that required heavy IOPS. Now days there is very little, if any performance difference between VMDKs and raw access to the drives.
5. Main drawbacks: Having to license ILO4 for some features I think should be standard rubs me the wrong way. If I have a server down the last thing I want to deal with is licensing issues. Supermicro boards have IPMI built in (but not in this form factor yet) which gives you remote media and KVM over IP for free. Only supports 16GB memory (that we know of). Only one PCI slot. That’s all I can think of now, for bitlocker there is no AES on the G1610T so you won’t have hardware assisted encryption. Sounds like you might want to take a look at http://www.nas4free.org/ as a potential VM.
If I buy the 1220v3 CPU then I can apply the included passive cooling and heatsink on it or do I need to buy anything extra besides the CPU (new heatsink or passive cooling)?
Also, do I need any special equipment (silicone or anything) for this? I need it for the CPU change, right?
I am not a real HW guru, but this is worth trying ;-)
HI, Daniel. Don’t get the V3, it’s based on the newer 1150 socket and isn’t compatible with the 1155 socket in the Microserver. For Xeons you want one that ends in a V1 or V2 (V2 is the newer Ivy Bridge). I’ve updated the post to show a list of processors that should be compatible along with the TDP rating (stock heatsink is designed for 35 watts). I found the stock heatsink was able to handle 69W in my environment so you probably don’t need a CPU fan (might be another story if you’re running the processor at 100% on all cores for hours on end). Just watch the temperature and if it starts to get hot disable one or two cores to bring it to 35W or get a fan. I used this Cooler Master paste, $5 at Amazon: http://amzn.to/14bN93p I think just about any CPU thermal paste would work. I used rubbing alcohol to clean the old paste off the old processor and heat sink before applying new paste.
You gave me answer to just about anything. I have ordered the thermal paste and I will be using the same CPU as you did.
1 vote for Ben to get a free server! :-)
Thanks vey much,
Daniel
Hey Ben, thanks a million for the review and I will be buying as a result of your input :) I have a question about your above post where you mention the onboard graphics of the CPU. Are you sure the server even uses the Intel graphics? According to the specs, there is an ancient Matrox G200 GPU. Do you think its possible to make use of the onboard intel GPU via the VGA?
You’re welcome Senator, I’m not sure, I didn’t realize it had an onboard GPU so it will probably work without an HD graphics processor… If I had a VGA cord for my monitor I’d try it but I’ve gone to HDMI cables. Ben
Hi, are you able to advise if the celeron model supports pass through of the drives? I want to direct pass through my storage drives to a freenas VM under ESXi?
The Celeron won’t do VT-d, you’ll need a Xeon E3 to do passthrough (VMDirectIO). But you might be able to use this RDM mapping hack… http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/25/rdm-mapping-of-local-sata-storage-for-esxi/ I don’t really recommend it, could lead to data corruption, etc. so getting a Xeon E3 that supports VT-d would be better. The best way to do VT-d is to pass a RAID controller to the VM, I’ve use the IBM ServerRaid M1015 flashed into IT mode which is less than $100 on eBay.
Also look into http://www.nas4free.org/, it’s the successor to FreeNAS and is based on the latest version of ZFS and FreeBSD 9.
In my tests I have found VMDKs to run just as fast as VT-d pass-through so unless you really need to give NAS4Free direct access to the disks for SMART monitoring and spindown and such give VMDKs a try. There’s a little more CPU overhead but the Celeron can handle it.
I finally got a an M1015 to install but I’m now torn between using the card or using the slot for a Radeon GFX card with passthrough for my VM media centre. Oh I wish there were two slots!.
On the nas4free front, it installed very easily but I’m not finding the performance great with the two VMDKs in a ZFS mirror. I’m just copying/restoring 600GB across my Gigabit network to the NAS (via SMB) and it’s suggesting 18 hours. That sounds pretty slow to me and it may be down to the network, of course. However, the transfer seems to go in bursts, like nas4free is taking its time writing the data. Odd.
I’ll probably try some local tests, e.g. transferring some data via USB drive to eliminate the network effect. Any other ideas gratefully received!
(P.S. I may also have an M1015 available to a UK buyer – at the market price, of course…)
Hi, No SATA cable. there is a power cable but it’s a mini 4-pin designed for the DVD drive.
It would be very easy to run a SATA cable from the ODD SATA port on the motherboard up to the ODD bay. If you’re trying to power a regular hard drive there’s a molex power cord just under the ODD bay that plugs into the storage array, it would be easy to intercept it at that plug and put in a molex power splitter.
any picturer’s or a how to put a 2,5 in place of the ODD :)
No pictures yet, as long as the ODD sata port can run a drive it should be possible.
Hi,
I can confirm that a molex power splitter works there. You have to think about where to lay your power cable for the 2,5″ HDD though, as HP seemed to intentionally have constructed this bay to only house its own products… ;-)
In my case, the integrated SATA controller has to be set to legacy or AHCI for the HDD to be detected and bootable (I am using a Adaptec 3405 for RAID 5 anyway :-) ).
Cheers,
Patrick
the Stock heatsink may hold up with the new processor BUT that doesnt mean the power circuit on the motherboard for the CPU will with a new CPU thats double the old TDP values… you want to stick as CLOSE as possible to the stock TDP value to avoid problems…
10 minutes isnt enough time to stress test it… you need in excess of 2 hours running in your warm room to SEE if you will have issues….
successor to FreeNAS???? huh… FreeNAS is now a project of IXsystems (has been for a few years) and is running the LATEST ZFS (v28) and the new version thats in RC is 9.1 of FreeBSD..
latest stable version is FreeBSD 8.3 i believe.
Thanks for the comment, Harry. The motherboard in the Gen8 Microserver is an Intel C204 which is compatible with Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors in the Xeon E3 series up to the 1290 (which is 95W). You’re right that 10 minutes isn’t long enough to properly stress test.
Hi, Magnus, Yes, for me form factor and noise are a primary factor. Otherwise I can’t think of a reason to get a Microserver over the ML310e (or something else the same size), especially with 32GB support. Thanks for making that point which is probably often overlooked.
The one thing that I’m seeing as a drawback to the ML310e versus the Microserver, is the lack of bundled HD caddies and the actual cost to purchase them. They don’t appear to be readily available and the ones that are look pretty pricey. If anyone knows where to find them cheaply, I’d love to know. That could be the deciding factor for me going with the ML310e with the E3-1220 v2 already installed.
Hi, Richard. Good find! If anything works that memory would (I don’t think it will work, but that’s the best chance we have). Unbuffered, ECC, and 16GB DIMMs, that’s the first I’ve heard of a product like that. The question is who’s going to be the first to risk $500 to try it? Ben
Prepare to be surprised. They are single 16GB modules and we have been selling them for almost 6 months now. We do try and stay ahead of the game, I guess that may be why our customers like us so much.
If there is anything more I can do please do not hesitate to ask.
Did you order any in the end? That part is the most compatible I have found for this server. The microserver spec shows it needs dual rank UDIMMS and these are dual rank, not the quad rank registered RDIMM memory floating around so looks like it should work. I’m looking to order some so watch this space!
Note: It is the exact same RAM from the exact same supplier as the above RAMCity link but they ship internationally outside the US.
I’ll update this blog once it arrives and I have tested it! So far from my searches on-line I can’t see anyone else who has tried this so I really hope it works
UPDATE 23/10/2013. The RAM has arrived! I’ll send another update once I’ve tested it! I’m unable to locate any posts of anyone having tried 2X16GB so if this works, I’ll be the first one to confirm :)
UPDATE 23/10/2013:
Looks like it doesn’t work! Gets stuck on error 0114 during memory initialization! 16GB max is all that’s supported. But since the chipset supports 32GB max, possibly it’s limited in the BIOS?
Though the chipset is able to handle a capacity of 32gb ram (udimm / unbuffered ECC), e3-1200 line cpus are not able to handle udimms with more than 8gb per channel. All mainboards that handle 32gb ram do have 4 channels…
The microserver gen8 mainboard only has 2 channels, which support a total of 16gb ram.
No bios update or 16gb udim will be able to fix that limitation.
It is the same info as I have been able to gather. I just wrongly mentioned it was a chipset limitation.
I’ve never ever had a confirmation from people who claimed they used 32gb.
Correct. Lets hope the gen 9 finally allows more RAM from the release date, otherwise its not worth it. In the meantime you can just do what i did and get a HP DL160 G6. Dual 5000 series quad core xeon cpus with HT and supports 96gb of ram, low power consumption (low voltage cpus). Can’t go wrong. You’ll need a rack since its rack mount. ..or just floor space for it to sit on. But they cost the same as a Gen8 Microserver off ebay. …so pretty good deal.
hi ben,
thank you for buying this server and reviewing it for us on the web.
would you happen to know the actual power draw of the Microserver at idle and under full load? I know the PSU is rated at 150w so I expect it somewhat lower than this?
Hi, pinoy. You’re welcome. I looked in iLO4 to see if there was any power usage reporting but nothing there, if someone gets me the kill-o-watt I’d be happy to check. http://amzn.com/w/20S9YXQKEXZTK although I’m sure someone has one and could post the answer…
just joined the Microserver G8 owners club. Before I used a HP X310 and I was able to control the fan speeds with speedfan – no luck with the G8 so far. I tried some of the power settings (through ILO), no influence on the fan speed. It is shown at 39% speed I consider it still too noisy. As you are looking at noise levels, too – any specialties you have configured to mute the server?
Hi, Stefan. Congratulations! I noticed the Microserver’s fan was a little noisy as well (compared to a server I built in a NZXT case). I wouldn’t try to throttle the fan down because the CPU is passively cooled so the motherboard needs to set the fan where it thinks it should be. The fan is large enough it shouldn’t be that loud, I don’t know if it’s the fan itself or perhaps the air rushing through the metal grate behind it. I haven’t looked into it as it’s quiet enough for me. Thanks. Ben
I found the issue – I had the 120i controller disabled and set to AHCI. Changed the config and now the server is inaudible. Thought that’s worth sharing.
Thanks for the tip Stefan. II changed it a few days ago and the fan is running slower, but the last time I took a reading of the fan speed it was 84F so I’m waiting for another hot day. Ben
I did, I bought two of these from SuperBiiz: http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=W8GE1600KI On the ILO4 integrated management log I get an informational log that says: “POST Information: Processor 1, DIMM 1 could not be authenticated as genuine HP SmartMemory. Enhanced and extended HP SmartMemory features will not be active.” I don’t know what features I’m missing but everything seems to work be fine.
I don’t have 4TB drives to test. With the SmartArray enabled you’ll only see 3TB for sure, but there’s a chance it will recognize the whole 4TB if you disable the SmartArray and just run it in SATA mode (which you would want to do with ZFS anyway) but I don’t know. I’m working on a post on installing the IBM ServerRaid M1015 which does support 4TB drives if flashed into IT (JBOD) mode. Hopefully I’ll have it posted tomorrow or the next day.
HP 120i manual (&320i) says:
Given the increasing need for high performance and rapid capacity expansion, the HP Dynamic Smart Array Controllers offer:
Up to 32TB of total internal storage with 8 x 4TB LFF SATA hard drives
Up to 9.6TB of total internal storage 8x 1.2TB SFF SAS hard drives (B320i with SAS license)
Does hp sell 4TB disks? Maybe that is the limitation? 3TB or 4TB, what’s the real difference?
– HP SmartMemory uses up to 20% less power than third-party memory while achieving the same performance. At low voltage (1.35 V), HP SmartMemory operates at DDR3-1333 MHz with one and two DIMMs per channel and at DDR3-1066 MHz at three DIMMs per channel. In comparison, third-party memory requires 1.5 V to achieve the same performance.
– HP SmartMemory performance is 25% higher with Unbuffered ECC (UDIMM) memory and capable of supporting 1333 MT/s up to 2 DIMMs per channel at 1.35V. Third-party memory supports 1066 MT/s bandwidth at higher operating voltage (1.5V).
Great information about the new Gen8 microserver!
I’m eager to get my hands one for myself. Is it possible to mount a harddrive anywhere else in the microserver? I currently have 5 harddrives in my N36L and would love to be able to transfer the whole raid set to the Gen8. The top ODD bay doesn’t seem to room a disk…
I don’t think you’d get a 3.5″ drive in the ODD bay, possibly the side if you weren’t running a card in the PCI slot… might be time for an external SAS enclosure.
Thank you Ben, this is detailed and very useful information on the MicroServer Gen8.
Anybody else finds this machine to be noisy ? The G1610T model is specified to be able to run at 21dBa yet I am reading 50-55 dBa at idle (once the machine posts and the fan spins down)!
For people running ESXI, have you been able to pass the Intel AHCI SATA controller using VT-d ?
It seems many people find the gen8 too noisy for a home server. HP has a problem, not just with the micro server, but other models of gen8 as well. And of course, the iLO board is built into it. Some issues: a non HP card lacks temp sensors, so fans speed up.
It seems one can buy the gen8 and hope HP updates the firmware to control the noisy fans, or go with something else. Bummer.
I find it to be noisier than it should be but I don’t hear it with the armoire doors closed. I was able to pass the B20i using VT-d… I haven’t tried in AHCI mode yet. One thing to note is that you can’t pass the controller that you’re using for a VMWare datastore… and VMWare requires a datastore so if you only have one controller you won’t be able to pass it using VT-d. Ben
I have found your blog, as well as the subsequent discussion/answers, extremely useful.
I am looking to purchase one of the G1610T units, with the possibility of upgrading the CPU to an E3-1265L V2, but have some slight reservations wrt possible heat dissipation issues.
Do you know whether the Gen8 Microserver uses the Intel Thermal Monitoring (Technology)/ management, e.g. for ILO, events, etc.? (Do you know if the E3-1265L V2 has a DTS – Digital Thermal Sensor?)
The reason that I ask is the comparison tables on the Intel websites indicate a ‘blank’ or dash for the E3-1265L V2 for this functionality under the “Advanced Technologies” sub-heading. The other processors, e.g. G1610T, G2020T, E3-1230 V2 and E3-1220L V2, etc. all indicate Yes for this functionality. (I couldn’t find any specific reference in the Thermal Specs/Guidelines either.)
Being new to this, I assume that the Microserver could be configured to generate an alarm/event/notification if thermal thresholds were exceeded, or possibly even power down the unit to prevent thermal damage, by using Intel’s Thermal Monitoring (Technology)/ management CPU functionality….. or is my understanding incorrect?
Hi, John. Xeons that have thermal sensors I know they won’t go into turbo mode at certain temperatures and I believe they’ll even downclock or shutdown (there is a thermal shutdown option in the Gen8 Microserver BIOS which is enabled by default, obviously leave that on). From reading this document is seems like the E3-1265L does have the thermal sensor but you may want to get clarification from Intel: http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/design-guides/xeon-e3-1200v2-lga1155-thermal-guide.pdf
Any comments on what sort of power consumption we’re looking at for the Gen8? Appreciate if you have the numbers for the original config, but I’d take your Xeon numbers as well if that’s what’s available.
I am considering a home server that can be used for serving internet accessible wordpress sites, one or two small game servers, and possibly use it for home backup and media streaming as well. My primary concern is annual power consumption, though secondarily I’m also considering the hardware costs. Was looking at a Mac Mini due to its energy efficiency, but it’s limited in terms of HDD bays and I’d probably be running Windows Server instead anyway, so paying more for the “Apple tax” was kind of a turn off.
How much juice does your machine take in off, idle, typical load and full load?
Hi, Christian. No idea on power consumption, I don’t have a watt-o-meter and where I live power is cheap enough I’d probably spend more on the watt-meter than I’d save by changes I’d make. One other thing to look at is the Mac Mini doesn’t use ECC memory which can lead to data corruption if bit flips aren’t detected (it does happen). If you are concerned about power you might be able to have the server power off then do a wake-on-lan when you need it, or have it power off at night and set the BIOS to turn it on. I leave mine on 24/7 because it’s always backing up or ZFS is scrubbing the disks. Thanks, Ben
Thanks for replying so quickly! =) Ah, unfortunately the electrical tariff where I live IS a major factor. =\
Oooh, thanks for the heads-up regarding the lack of ECC RAM support on the Mac Mini. I hadn’t considered that much although now that you mentioned it, it might be a crucial thing to note since I’d be using it for the family’s backup. Will explore further before I make a decision then.
Just one quick question how tall is the CPU Heatstink?
If it is at least 15mm tall, with your pictures seems to be a bit taller, you can attach a Cablematic VU81 Cooler desigend for LGA-1156 processors. Since LGA-1155 and LGA-1156 coolers are fully compatible because the same mounting holes spacing and the VU81 is an axial blower fan you don’t need clearence over it only on the sides.
With this I think you can run full core’s and threads of a E-1265 V2 in rellatively warm enviroments (30º C)
Hi, Marcos. I didn’t measure but based on pictures of the Cablematic VU81 it looks like it would easily fit. One trick with any CPU cooler is finding a way to power it since there isn’t an extra power connector for a FAN… you would want to figure out how to regulate the fan speed based on temperature somehow… Thanks. Ben
John – Please keep us in the loop with your findings. I just received my G1610T (also thanks to HSS Newegg deal) and my E-1265 V2 is due to arrive tomorrow. Kinda wish I had waited a bit to dig into this a bit further… but so far it looks like I might’ve been lucky with my CPU selection (hoping for best feature-set and thermal performance, regardless of cost).
Also, Ben… thoroughly impressed with this valuable post and your diligence with replies. By far the most useful series of answers on the new Microservers to be found *anywhere* online. I completely agree, HP oughta send you a freebie… considering it was your posts that pushed me over the line to a new purchase!
Thanks Ben. Agree, the 45w max TDP of the E3-1265LV2 is very attractive… however, what’s throwing me off is the fact that you’re running at higher wattage with no noticeable heat issues. So now I’m thinking I could get away with upping to the E3-1275V2 without any issues. Bottom line, if cost weren’t an issue, which of the following would you go with:
You’re welcome. If money were not a consideration I’d get the E3-1265L v2. You will have no worry about heat and I think for most applications 16 or even 32 gb memory will be the main bottleneck before you come close to maxing out the cpu. There’s no reason at all to get the 1275.. Especially when it puts out more heat. The only thing it has that the 1270 doesn’t is hd graphics which the Microserver probably won’t use. Thanks, Ben
Does anyone know how to team the NICs yet? Running server 2012 which has its own teaming but im not sure this is the best way and what HP had in mind, is there a utility i download?
I got a HP 1810 switch, do i need to setup two ports as a trunk maybe?
Thanks for the reply re: cpus. I was also leaning towards the E3-1265L v2 as the definitive best option for this server… and I imagine many others will too. Another positive spec that stood out is the dramatic jump between the default clock speed of 2.5 ghz and the turbo clock speed of 3.5 ghz… when most other Xeon options only jump about .5 ghz. This should lend well to thermal considerations and other server specific needs. My E3-1265LV2 is in the mail… this time Intel should be thanking you for my purchase! Cheers.
PS. If anyone is looking for a Blu-ray option for this server, here’s the best option available:
Panasonic/Matshita UJ-262 9.5mm SATA Blu Ray Burner Drive
Note, this is the most recent revision of this drive… be careful to avoid the older model. I picked mine up on ebay for about $170. Shipped from China, as it isn’t available in the US yet.
Really useful blog, thanks for sharing info about CPU upgrade on microserver. I wonder – will latest Citrix XenServer install on CPU upgraded system? Could anybody do such test, please? :) Citrix XenServer is free to download and use.
Hi, Andrew. I haven’t tried Xenserver on it, if I had an extra Microserver I’d give it a try. Maybe someone else can post here.. Citrix would be a good alternative to VMware to look into especially now that Citrix has completely open sourced XenServer and all the enterprise features (like failover and such).
Well maybe another Microserver is not necessary, if someone could try to install latest XenServer on USB key that would prove this is possible without destroying current installation on hard drive… Simply change boot drive, that’s it. Thank you.
Hi, Andrew. It’s not that, it’s that I’ve got services (Email, my blog, minecraft server, etc.) running on the Microserver now that I don’t want to take offline to test it out. I tried Xen a few years ago and wasn’t happy with it so went with VMware, but things may have changed now that a few years have gone by and now. At the time I tested Xen you couldn’t balloon memory (at least not on the free version) but that may not be the case anymore. Hopefully someone else will try and report back.
Hi, with the stock Celeron g1610T CPU, and the bios released 8/14, I’m seeing 33watts with no drives, and about 60watts with 4 500GB 7200RPM SATA drives. Hopefully it will get a little better with newer drives.
Has anyone tried putting 32gb memory into this thing yet?
That is a selling point for me if possible.
I found some more 2x16gb ram that I think might work? ..also much much cheaper and its crucial, which i believe to be decent memory brand. http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?imodule=CT2K16G3ERSLD41339
I am going to try these out soon, but…being broke, its nice to let someone else foot the bill who can afford trying it first ;^)
Ahh ok, Good to know Thanks Ben.
I searched all over but it looks like ramcity is the only (2x16gb) 32gb kit out there that I can find that would come close to being what a G8 could use…IF it could use it?
I really wish the G8 could handle what I do with the applications and activities i run on esxi 5.1 with only 16gb and I personally would use it for this as well as my SMB operations if it could handle 32gb.
Its interesting in that not only does average SMB look to be heading that way, but the era of 32gb home servers is slowly becoming a reality, and sooner or later I think the microserver bandwagon is going to hop on it. maybe next year =)
That being said I am keeping other “BYOS” options out there, and so far the only other mini ITX system I have seen that can handle 64gb of ram across 2 DIMM is Gigabytes GA-F2A85XN-WIFI motherboard. Sadly its not a server or enterprise board, and enterprise server arch is best for what I do. Right now I have yet to find a server board mini ITX that handles 32gb and up.
That G8 sure is tempting though, ..If only a little bigger budget….I would have a stack of G8s =)
Thank you for all the excellent material on this microserver.
—
Jared
You’re welcome Jared. I’m looking forward to what the market will bring in the Microserver realm. The 32GB limitation is the Xeon E3 processors, Intel wants you to go to an E5 if you need more than 32GB memory. For SMBs right now you’re better off going larger than mini-ITX. With Supermicro hardware you get free out of band management (KVM over IP) and 32GB memory on the E3 platform and up to 192 or 256GB memory per socket on the E5 platform. And for a SMB if you need support there are plenty of vendors that sell SuperMicro based servers pre-built at a reasonable cost.
Apologies for the late reply (-been dealing with personal issues).
I have sent a request to Intel seeking clarification – I will post an update when I receive a response.
The other concern I have with the 1265 processor (which may or may not apply for your application) relates to Ben’s earlier post regarding Supermicro’s C204 suggestion not to use an E3 with onboard graphics (E3-xxx5 series) – I do not know whether this applies to the G8 microserver implementation (- refer http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon/c202_c204/x9scm-f.cfm)
Skelzer FYI:
I also received a reply from Intel RE: Xeon E3-1265L V2 – they have verified “that the processor E3-1265L has Intel Thermal Monitoring Technologies and it is also equipped with a Digital Thermal Sensor.” The Intel website information has been reported for correction – so all is looking good.
Intel C204 chipset does support Intel I/OAT technology. Would you please check if Gen8 server has this option in the BIOS? http://www.dmtinc.cl/?v=hzXK3.jpg
I’ve got the HP 5.1.0-Update1-1065491-HP-5.50.26.iso on a USB stick which I’ve recently used sucessfully on other HP Proliant servers.
I boot from the USB stick, and install ESXi to another USB stick.
When I try to boot off the new stick, VMWare begins to load and says at the top of the screen: “Recovery”, and then “Loading”, but nothing ever happens.
I’ve tried both the internal and external USB2 ports.
FreeNAS works fine from USB.
Also, I cannot boot off of the MicroSD card; is that normal?
I hope to use this as a dev server for my Web & WordPress projects.
Maybe this will help you. I am using ESXi 5.1 just fine but I had to download the following image – VMware-ESXi-5.1.0-Update1-1065491-HP-5.50.26 as the vanilla iso didn’t have correct drivers. The MicroSD boots up just fine as I installed the hypervisor on it.
Hi, Barry. VMware will refuse to use a USB device (which is what the MicroSD card reader on the motherboard is) as a data store. It’s just not going to happen.
Hi, Kenni. I don’t know if the 120i works in ESXi, I can see the controller but I just put it in SATA mode and use ZFS (RAID-Z) which I believe is superior (as far as data integrity, performance, capacity and cost) to most hardware RAID solutions. It obviously depends on what you’re trying to do, but I would put the controller into SATA mode and run ZFS over using the 120i in just about any scenario… the only thing I have seen close to ZFS’s end-to-end data integrity is buying a storage appliance like NimbleStorage… but ZFS is free and open source and will run on your Microserver. Do a Google search for Napp-It’s all in one ZFS / VMware solution.
Please I need your support on how to configure an HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen 8 with the highest specs possible?
– 16GB or 32 GB RAM DDR3.
– The highest Intel XEON E3 speed possible without heat E3-1265LV2?
– The Maximum HP smart controller card that can be installed?
– The Maximum HDD capacity including SSD drive if possible?
– Is it possible to add an ODD DVD drive as well?
The MicroServer will be used for virtual lab environment using Hyper-V 2012 R2.
With the new Server 2012 R2 we can configure storage tiers that includes both SATA and SSD in order to get the maximum IO possible.
The new OS 2012 R2 is smart enough to move the hot data to the SSD and low data to the slower disk dynamically.
I need 100GB or 200GB as RAID1 for the OS and the other for Data Virtual Machines combined between SATA 6Gbps and SSD.
Hi, Charbel. I don’t think I can be of too much help, but here goes.
– So far I have not heard of anyone who has tried 32GB memory.
– I think the E3-1265L V2 is the best combination considering performance and heat.
– I have no idea on the HP smart controller. I use ZFS which just needs a dumb JBOD controller.
– The controller that comes with the Microserver supports up to 3TB drives (and only the first two drives are . You can get a cheap M1015 HBA which will support 4TB in JBOD mode, or if you’re trying to do hardware RAID I’m sure you can get a controller that supports 4TB drives.
– I have not tried to add an ODD DVD drive but I’m sure it’s possible.
Let me know how your lab works! I actually tested Hyper-V 2012 on the HP Microserver N40L and it had horrible I/O performance, but it may do better on faster hardware.
I run ZFS which also provides SSD caching. I boot VMware off the USB, the SSD is VMware’s datastore where I have a ZFS server that uses two VMDKs on the SSD as the ZIL (ZFS intent log to cache random writes until they can be written to spindles) and L2ARC (Level 2 Adaptive Replacement Cache) which puts the most frequently accessed data onto the SSD. So the ZIL, L2ARC, and 3 2TB spindle drives in RAID-Z make up the zpool array which is shared back to VMware as a data store via NFS. This setup outperforms some mid-level SANs while also providing better data integrity and more space. If the SSD fails all the array configuration and data is stored on the 2TB spindles so it would just be a matter of re-installing OmniOS and re-importing the pool. Obviously having mirrored SSDs would be better, but they’re so expensive!
Hi, the onboard 120i controller is not full hardware raid and needs a non-opensource driver if you’re running in RAID mode. If you use the HP ESXi installer, the driver is included; otherwise the ‘generic’ ESXi installer from VMWare does not include the driver and the RAID will not work.
If you just use the 120i controller as an AHCI SATA controller, you don’t need special drivers.
I have the HP ESXI Installer. When I install using the installer ESXi sees the logical RAID fine (2×3 TB HDs) but when it reboots after installation none of the drives work. The USB that I install on doesn’t work either. This is the same for a non RAID HD.
The drives don’t work? Did you use the HP Intelligent Provisioning? Do they appear under Storage Adapters? Did you try to create a datastore under Storage? Is there an error message when you try? Have you tried formatting the array to GPT using PartedUtil via the CLI using SSH?
Thanks for the informative blog post :). Now very tempted to get a Gen8 Microserver, I’ve got one of the old N36L ones sitting in the cupboard, but it’s not quite got enough oomph for EXSi stuff that I’m doing.
Any chance you measured or could check the hole spacing on the heatsink mounting holes? Standard 1155/1156 is 75mm between the holes in a square, if this is the same then it means any aftermarket heatsink should work :).
Unfortunately, the heatsink isn’t standard 1155/1156 heatsink format but a server form called slim ILM, it’s available on aftermarket, too. But their fans are typically far more noisy than consumer heatsinks
Why do you people disable Turbo instead of disabling a core or two. Turbo also Means it doesn’t clock down when not in use.
In any case, I’ve left turbo on but disabled two cores. Works great :)
I’m running Hyper-V on Server 2012. I’m much more fan of Hyper-V over Esxi, but to each his own.
I came from N40L and one strange thing in Gen8 is the apparant lack of extra power/molex plugs. Found a single molex under the ODD day, which I could split out to add some extra devices.
I had 2x 8gb non-ecc ram I used in the N40L and wanted to use in my Gen8. It didn’t Work. Neither did my 2x8gb non-ecc ram from my PC (high end), so I’m at 2×4 ecc at the moment. Bummer.
For people asking for heat sink measurements. I didn’t measure, but the holes are not placed in a Square as normal.
My Xeon is at 40c though.
Your information is useful, thanks for your hardworking :)
I’ve got a microserver gen8 with E3-1230v3 installed, but i found
that the heatsink is a little bit too hot to touch by bare hands when all 4 cores enabled
so I disabled 1 of 4.
I use it as my home network infrastructure via ESXi Server.
Here’s my VM layout, eth2 and eth3 part are under planning. http://images.plurk.com/ojcr-3VTZVVEquGlP1fFnUekKRq.jpg
ClearOS as firewall, NAT and DHCP server.
Windows7 serves as media streaming, BitTorrent and VPN server.
I use this configuration with 10G memory installed, 3 HDD drives(2TB, 320GB and 808GB)
with SmartArray disabled (and yes, the fan is quite noisy :p)
Here’s something people may feel interested.
1.
I’ve tested 2/4 and 3/4 cores enabled, but the temperature seems to be same, both 40C(107F) in iLO, I suspect the accuracy…..
2.
The big 14cm fan uses a properitery connector so it’s not possible to change speed with an off-the-shelf fan controller unless you change fan or figure out the pin definition.
3.
It DOES NOT support Non-ECC Memory, I mistakenly bought a non-ECC 8G and it won’t boot.
4.
It has a floppy 4pin connector as the power source of slim ODD drive which is somehow weird, why not slim-line sata?
5.
The heatsink uses slim ILM instead of normal 1156/1155 format, so consumer aftermarket stuff like Corsair or Coolermaster are not available.
Turbo also disabled the dynamic performance. I actually think it says so in the describtion in the bios too.
Ended up enabling all 4 cores though and disabled Hypterthreading instead. Gave better performance.
I can confirm the thing about UDIMM ECC as required. I have tested using 2 different kits of non-ecc and it would boot on neither. Both kits working on n40L. I havn’t found any post anywhere using Google, where anyone actually managed to use 32gb.
Means it will be almost impossible to use 32gb as UDIMM is the “discount” ECC version and really aren’t available in 2x16gb kits. I had to pay up 170UK Pounds for 2x8gb
I got my server at last, installed CPU, memory, everything is running fine, thanks for all the help!
My problem is that I have 2 pcs of 3TB NL-SAS HDDs, but if I put them in the rack and push them in, they are not recognized at all by the raid card. After a little more investigation it seems 100% sure that they don’ t even power up, I rip them out and don’ t hear any spin-stop or anything, also when in their place, I don’ t feel anything spinning.
My questions:
1. Am I able to use NL-SAS HDDs in this server at all? The connectors seem to fit.
2. How can it be that the HDDs don’t power up? I see that extra cards can help me with SAS connection (https://b3n.org/m1015-hba-in-the-hp-gen8-microserver/), but spinup should be working for the HDDs, right?
re power connectors: the power connector for the optical drive can be converted to a SATA power connector with a cable, e.g. “Dell MX714”, ~$10USD on eBay.
Yea, I guess so. There is only 200Mhz standard difference -> 3.3 vs 3.1.Having the 1230 leaves you with future HyperThreading ability if you need it though :)
In Denmark where I live the price is really not that much higher for the 1230 though and I tend to believe the 1220 are just lower quality 1230 so they have HT disabled (just my personal opinion mind)
I run VMware ESXi 5.1 (HP’s version) on the Microserver and it monitors all that stuff (I think there are 9 temperature sensors and a fan speed monitor), also you can monitor it from the iLO management interface.
I think it’s safe.
My server is located in a tiny room along with my synology ds 1513+. Server has 4 discs and nas has 6 discs. Room just big enough for the two units, but 2m high.
I have disabled HyperThreading, but running Hyper-V with 4 guests, 2 of them on 24/7, and it never gets close to hot.
If you asked me about turbo mode, I allready had that on. I just enabled HyperThreading as well now, so all 4 cores, turbo mode and hyperthreading is enabled now. Will see how it goes. Thermal sensor says about 40ish celcius with 4 cores and turbo mode.
Running Server 2012 Hyper-V with 4 guests (2 DCs and 2 Exchange), så CPU usage is periodic.
I’ve found that there is no problem with having turbo mode & HT enabled, at least for me with my e3-1265Lv2. The temps are pretty good, this server is more heat efficient than the old gens because the case is metal, not plastic, allowing heat to escape more easily. It feels like a proper HP Proliant instead of a plastic Dell! The stock heatsink is quite good with the hotter CPU’s, plus these newer gen CPUs are quite energy efficient and therefore also produce less heat than the previous gen
Another person:
This happened to me on a bl460c G7 and all i had to do to correct it is shutdown the server, re-seed the DIMM chips and it booted fine without error.
Another Again:
Solved it by looking into the processor socket, mine was realy messed up. Had a diagonal line from left to right with bend pins
I’ve already researched it, but those servers that had a similar issue use different components and are more high end. These 16GB modules are currently the only ones available and they meet all the requirements of the gen8, except the capacity is larger. I’ve just updated the BIOS on my server to the latest version and that didn’t help, but I think this can be resolved through a BIOS update. HP has a list of approved memory, even memory that meets all the criteria can fail if it’s not on that list, therefore I suspect someone with good knowledge of BIOS modding can probably fix that.
Maybe when Kingston or Crucial make 32GB RAM it might work. The only reason it’s not on HP’s approved list is because 1x16GB ECC UDIMM RAM is not popular. Only when the big manufacturers start producing it will HP add them to their HP Smart Memory list. Maybe down the road they may do a firmware update, who knows. This is still a new server, time will tell when 16GB modules get cheaper and more people try it.
Hi all, fantastic blog, thanks to Ben and all the other contributors.
I have the Gen8 GT1610), 16gb of HP ram, 4 x 2TB WD Reds (NAS class drives). I think i’ll also upgrade to the E3-1265L V2 (thanks to this thread :) )
HP dropped the ball with only having 2 of the 4 drive controllers to be 6Gbit. So i want to put a 3rd party raid5 card in there to give me near 6TB of mas speed usable storage.
Someone on here has the HP P410 card in, any other recommendations please?
Mine will be booted with Server 2012 Hyper-V, and mainly just run WHS2011 as a hyper-v guest. Room for other testbeds though.
Possibly overkill for my use, but my current NL36 is old hat now.
If i do get a raid 5 card, is there a way of putting say a 256Gb SSD in to run the host OS and use the mechanical drives as raid storage array? Is it worth it? Or should i just use the 4x2TB drives to create 2 raid5 arrays; one for host os, the other for VHDs and storage?
Thanks so much to everyone for this blog, its by far the best i’ve found on the web for the microserver Gen8
I got a M1015 also (very cheap) and all is working great. I even got SAS disks, they work flawlessly. Nothing extra to do…
But forget about RAID5, this card is not for RAID5, but RAID1 works great, LSI chipset, WebBIOS, MegaCLI, everything works just great from either LInux, Windows or even ESXi, all can run MegaCLI. You can even create a script for RAID-checking, because you will need it sincs iLO will not be able to alert you of RAID problems with extra cards. But MegaCLI is great for this!
Oh yeah, M1015 can be flashed to many modes (google it), allowing passthrough of cards to VMs or accessing HDDs directly from OS without the extra RAID-layer. But these are not needed for normal operation with RAID1.
Hey Jacko.
I’ve bought a P410 + 512mb flash and battery for use in my Gen8. Performance is really bad unless you get the flash and battery, so remember to add that.
If you want to run Raid5 you have to pay for Advanced features as P410 does not come with that out of the box.
I honestly don’t like Raid5 anyway, and am using Raid10 myself.
You need at least 3 discs for running Raid5, so you can’t run 2 raid5 arrays on 4 discs. You can run 2 raid 1 arrays, but will get better read performance running them all as raid 10.
I’ve seen it a bunch of time that a Raid5 disk breaks after X years and you start to rebuild. But since you added all disks at the same time, odds are that at least one more disk breaks during the rebuild, leaving you with nothing.
Raid 5 is much slower and system intensive when writing as it has to calculate distributed parity (spread out parity instead of 1:1 on raid 10).
That said, I did run Raid5 successfully on my NAS for 5 years. I just don’t like to gamble anymore :)
My system is:
2x 2½” SAS 146GB drives (I bought them cheaply) which fits nicely instead of the ODD bay. Runs in Raid1 for my OS, which is Hyper-V 2012R2. I am planning to add 2 more SAS drives and Mount them on the side of the PSU, making a small bracket.
I have 4x 1TB WD RE (not red) drives in Raid10 which I use for an DC 2012R2 and an Exchange 2013 running on an 2012R2 :)
Is this side bracket sold anywhere? or are there any instructions/drawings of it? Is there room for both disks on the same side? And I guess that a seperate controller card is necessary to add these two disks, if a disk is installed in the ODD and the four diskspaces are used in the main part?
I’m just curiuos, do you have two disks in the ODD bay, and how did you hook it up? And how about installation of 2012 R2 on the ODD disks, did you install through provisioning or just directly? How about drivers?
As Daniel said, the M1015 Works fine.
I had that one before going to the P410. I changed because I could add Flash and battery to the P410 which isn’t possible on M1015.
P410 can also be managed by bios and HP software on the Gen8.
When adding flash and battery you get much better performance on the P410, but it also comes at a Price Premium compared. At least here in Denmark!
Hi fellas, thanks for the replies. My previous NL36 has an Intel RS2WC040 raid5 card in it.
Do you think this will suffice? If so, i’ll rip it out and put it in the Gen8.
I did entertain Raid10, but it requires 4 disks and would effectively halve my storage, only giving me 4TB.
If i DO go for raid10, i’d prefer a card in there that will give full 6gbit to each controller. rather than the dumb way HP went by only having 2x 6gbit controllers and the other 2 being 3gbit. Just doesn’t make sense to me.
I guess i could use a 256Gb ssd in place of the ODD and could run the 2012R2 Hyper-V from that. I don’t the OS not being raided, i’ll take an auto backup of it regularly so if it dies, i should be able to re-image a new drive without issue.
Morten, you really think there is enough room to fit any more drives in your Gen8?
Hi again,
Daniel, i just checked out your link (after my last post). That may well do what i want if i decide to go raid 10.
I’m a little less knowledgeable than some of your guys when it comes to raid and vm, so some of my questions may seem a little…err….out there, lol?
Here goes;
is it possible to put a M1015 in the gen8 to server all 4x 2TB drives at full 6bit speeds in raid10.
Then install 1 or 2 SSD’s onto the inbuilt B20i, again to give the full 6gbit? If i used the ODD conector then i’d only get 3gbit surely?
Any of that make sense? :)
Using the inbuilt B20i for extra 2 HDDs is OK, but you must know that M1015 can handle 8 drives, it has 2 miniSAS brackets, so all you need to solve is where to put the extra HDDs. The cable can be hacked outside of the house.
Or you can get a more expensive RAID card that has externel miniSAS connector.
Yeah, 3 gbit/sec is the max you will get anyway :-) And the ODD will give you only that, yup.
Jacko,
About room to fit more drives: yes, I have 2x 2½ SAS drives + battery instead of the optical drive. I just squeezed some of the upright metal thingies meant to hold the ODD.
I found a post somewhere on the net with someone who made a bracket to Mount 2x 2½” drives on the side of the PSU. I did the measures myself, and it will work. Even for the thicker SAS drives I have lying around.
Already found and old ATX PSU and my dremel to make the bracket :)
Regarding the 6gb and 3gb. I don’t really think its going to be an issue for you.
Normal 3½ drives (including RED) can’t saturate a 3Gb sata.
About Space and raid etc. How much Space are you going to use? Unless you are going to use it as storage it doesn’t really matter how you spend 2 of the 4 discs.
Hi Morten,
the Reds will be used at storage. I’m using WHS2011 in hyper-v and want to load on most of my dvd/bd and music library, so in raid10 i’ll get 4tb instead of nigh on 6tb in raid5. Quite a difference when bd rips average out around 10-15gb.
When you guys talk about raid cards allow you to pass through the raid controller to VM, what exactly do you mean by that?
Cheers
Jacko
Just tried 2×16 GB Ram modules and got stuck at 90% with Status Code 0114.
Also tried with just module.
Kingston
Equiv: HP/Compaq
KTH-PL313LV/16GB
P/N: 627812-B21
SS013A0 9965516-031.A00LF
That’s an RDIMM, you need UDIMM’s. Currently there are no 16GB UDIMM modules from the big vendors. The only vendor that has them is the one I used called MacSales, but those modules are for Intel Xeon MACs, and didn’t work. Until Kingston releases 16GB UDIMM Dual or Single Rank (Not Quad rank), there is no possibility in getting 32GB of RAM. Probably be released next year.
I made a deal with a big supplier, so I can just return them for full refund.
I have seen the ones from MacSales but not really available here in Denmark.
I’m running a e3-1230v2 in my microserver now and it all seems to be going well! I have an Akasa K25 cpu fan bolted on and wired to share the PWM speed control of the rear chassis fan..
Interestingly, the iLO reports a CPU temp of 40celcius. It never ever fluctuates.
I have lm-sensors on linux watching the temperature of the 4 cores, running Prime95 and it is reporting around 65 degrees and yet the ilo is only reporting 40, exactly the same as it reported when I first powered the box up.
I’m not too worried about a sensor reporting a low value, but the box is relucant to increase the fan speed (which is always 29-31% according to the iLO)
Can I ask what your iLO reports for the sensor “02-CPU” and if you see the fan speed increase under heavy load?
Chrisp, thats a coincidence. My fan just arrived but havn’t installed it yet. Also an Akasa K25.
I’m using an e1230v2 as well and 02-CPU is always at 40c and never fluctuates eithers.
I understand the HP Bios has some problems with these Xeons (and others) and they even say they released a new Bios to fix it, but it’s not available at their site.
HP Document ID: c03898077
Virtual-APIC Page Accesses With 32-Bit PAE Paging May Cause a System Crash
Min has actually begun making virtual mem errors, so looking forward to the new bios:
11/11/2013 – Updated to include HP ProLiant ML310e Gen8 v2 and HP ProLiant DL320e Gen8 v2 System ROMs that fix this issue.
The following operating environment is required to expose the server to this issue and HP strongly recommends immediate application of the System ROM update described in the Resolution section below :
•Server operating in a virtualized environment
•Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) enabled
•Intel VT FlexPriority Enabled (this functionality is enabled or disabled by the Hypervisor)
•Intel Hyperthreading Enabled
•Extended Page Tables Enabled (this functionality is enabled or disabled by the Hypervisor)
•Guest operating system using 32-bit PAE Paging Mode
1) the Xeon chip we’re using has a tdp 35-ish degrees hotter so a larger or more actively cooled heatsink will help.
2) the ilo isn’t correctly reading the cpu temp (bios bug) so it never sees a need to increase the chassis fan speed over 30% (for me) so that’ll make the passive heatsink even less effective
My cpu fan speed is tied to the chassis fan speed so that’s still a bit of a concern
I have a Microserver running the E3-1265Lv2 – been running in an enclosed space for two months now and hasn’t missed a beat. The fan is audible, but not uncomfortably so… (though when I closed the door of the cabinet it is in the fan spun up noticeably.)
The server has 16GB of HP equivalent Kingston RAM – the server recognises it as HP RAM so I recommend it. You’ll save ~40% on cost.
I also have a 120GB Kingston SSD in the ODD bay running as the OS partition with Windows Server 2012 (now R2) – other than having to change the existing 4-pin to a SATA power connector, I have had no problems. Boot time once you’re past the HP POST is very fast and the OS is snappy.
I installed a P222 smart array controller and have 4 x 3TB WD RED drives running in RAID5 for my data storage. I would love to know how much power it is pulling, but don’t have any way to measure it. It’s clearly less than 150W though!
Only issue I have had is with Hyper-V – when creating VMs use SCSI not IDE for the disks. When I left it on the default setting of IDE the performance of the VM was appalling. SCSI made a huge difference. To be fair though, I only have one VM running now – it’s a disposable Windows 8.1 installation I use for downloading.
In a nutshell – the E3-1265Lv2 is a cracking processor, enables all the virtual machine goodies you need, runs cool enough for the stock heatsink and is at a decent enough price point. The only problem I see at the moment is availability! Buy one if you can!
Would be nice to see a Gen8 v2 with Socket 1150 support… Hint hint HP…
Same reasons as Chrisp said. My chassis fan is running almost full tilt most of the time. Seems its tied to raid controller somehow and I’m using an P410 instead of the onboard controller.
(note: seems my fan is Down to 32% right this moment, so now i’m perplexed.) Cpu fan still not really noise compared.
I tied my fan speed to 12v molex. Still less noise than from the 120mm which is running rather fast most of the time regardless of what I do.
The added active fan on CPU will also (hopefully) help cooling some of the hotter areas like LOM and Chipset. Will also blow some on ram, but I don’t think thats an issue.
What is the “02-CPU” temperature (log into ilo Information -> System Information -> Temperature)?
Mine is stuck at 40%.
I’m concerned that if I were to use the B120i drivers (which I can’t because HP made them closed source.. fucking good job, guys!) Then my ilo would not run the system fan at 30% but more likely 6%
However, because it also can’t read the temperature of the CPU, I would be extremely worried that it never increased the fan speed when the CPU was busy.
If I run 8 copies of Prime95 on my system, the CPU stats report 66degrees… however, the ilo still thinks its 40degrees and the fan speed never increased.
If you’re running a Xeon AND the B120 drivers, I’m concerned the fan might actually be too slow. If it could read the CPU temperature correctly, it might speed it up (say to 15%)
I guess “quiet” is a relative thing. But mine is running at 32 % now.
Still too noisy for me if it was to sit next to me. Since it’s hidden far away, away, I don’t much mind.
I have all 4 cores, turbo and hyperthreading enabled and it’s not getting hot, so I’m ok as well :) Not hot as measured by the rest of temp probes and by touching the heat-sink after a while.
My cpu temp in ilo is also stuck at 40% which is why the Akasa K25 i mounted is drawing full 12v from molex. Can’t really rely on the system fan.
As a side note, I found that disabling VT-d on the cpu makes for a more stable run. At least mine stopped rebooting once in a while running Server 2012 R2 hyper-V.
Just have to wait for the bios update HP has published news about, but not made available, grr.
Where did you read about an update that would fix the fan speed issue. Do you have a link? I’m experiencing it too in both B120i and AHCI, no difference. Way too loud for me.
I just purchased proliant gen8 microserver. With a good cpu and a pcie Video card can i play games on it ? Could you please recommend me a good cpu for games?
Hey Frank. It’s not saying anything about fan noise, so I guess you have to fix that some other way.
The update I referred to was “only” about rebooting when using VT-D for some Xeons
Google “hp knowledge base c03898077”.
I’m absolutely certain it mentioned bios (J08) in revision 1, but the post is now revision 2, without any references, so I guess it might be bios J06…
I’m just running with the onboard B120i and Smart disabled completely as I use an HP P410 controller. I tested if I could make the fan go slower, by enabling the onboard fan, and tried various settings like AHCI etc, but with no difference.
I could not make the fan go slower than the 32ish, and it still sounds like a turbine. I will end up changing the fan or or insert a resistor if it continues.
While testing the above, I noticed they have a newer “HP Intelligent Provisioning (IP)” than the one I used. Google this to view instructions “HP ProLiant Gen8 Server series – How to Reinstall or Upgrade Intelligent Provisioning on HP Gen8 Server”.
I’m surely not pleased with the server being so loud, since dbA is specified to 21. I see others having this issue too: http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/ProLiant-Servers-Netservers/MicroServer-Gen8-is-noisy/td-p/6171563#.Upte_uIkr80
Think I’ll be creating a ticket in the upcoming week to, as well as the others. I will try to remember to report back here with the result. If you get any new information on this issue, please also do post this.
I gave HP a call, and funny enough, the first level supporter I talked with, confirmed the issue as he has had others several months ago, reporting the precise same issue. He mentioned that the issue currently is placed at third level support, meaning that the are handling the issue, trying to solve it. So the more people leaving a greeting with HP support, the more pressure will be put upon them. Hope it will be solved soon.
How many disk i can put on/or inside the MS GEN8? I would like to build 6 2,5 disk inside, and 2 disk in raid 1 for the os, and the 4 3,5 disk so that Will be 12 disks. Will this work?
MrMoi,
It depends what you’re trying to do. The onboard controller can run in AHCI JBOD mode, and supports at least 5 drives.
In RAID mode, it only supports RAID 0, 1, and 10.
(no raid 5 or 6)
The connector for the DVD drive is standard SATA, but the cable going to the 4 hotswap bays is a SAS multi-port cable which splits into 4 hotplug ports.
You could get a cable to break it into standard cables, or you could get drive bay adapters to plug your 2.5″ drives into the hotplug bays.
MrMoi: Yes you can. You have to make brackets for the sides though.
I have 3x 2½ SAS discs on top + Battery for my P410 controller. The SAS discs are thicker than normal 2½ discs.
MrMoi, regarding cables. Don’t start on this project if you are having issues with the cables already.
The onboard Raid Controller does NOT Work with SAS discs, so don’t try that. For the amount of discs you want to use I’d buy a HP P410 controlller or the cheaper M1015
controller for the 2½ discs and then use the onboard controller for the 4 interal ones.
The cables you are going to need with SATA 2½ discs are:
Two: SFF8087 to 4x SATA
You need to split out the molex found under the Optical bay area. I also took power for some of my discs from the Optical bay power source with a homemade adapter.
I Might be making a section on my site with the modifications I made (would be nice if I could just post Pictures here)
How is the HP server handling 3rd party RAID controller cards? Want RAID 5, and think the P222 is a bit pricy. Didn’t realize that onboard RAID 5 wasn’t supported until I got the server. Thought it was std. on most mashines.
Hi Frank,
I recently got an LSI 9240 card on eBay. I had a problem with the card not saving a new RAID config, but updating the LSI firmware solved that.
However, sometimes the system will not boot up with the LSI installed; it continually reboots after the POST screen.
Unplugging the power seems to help.
The LSI has the same SAS/SATA connector as the HP motherboard, so one can plug the HP cable into the controller and still use the drive bays.
Frank, I’ve used an M1015 (no raid 5) and an HP 410 (no raid 5) which I still use, without any issues.
It’s really nice using the HP 410 as it uses the HP Smart Array / Utility software.
I bought the P410 on ebay from the uk and battery+cable from ebay de.
Raid 5 is not standard on more “enterprise-like” raid controllers, as Raid 5 is really very vulnerable. Consider you buy 4 identical discs.
After 4-5 years the first one fails. You buy a new disc and the system starts rebuilding. It needs to do a full parity/checksum on all the discs to do that, it is rather likely that one more disc fails on you and you loose evertyhing.
This exact thing happened to me on a Synology nas 3 weeks ago. Luckily I had it setup to raid 6. so it was ok to Loose 2 discs.
Raid 5 requires lots of cpu in order to process the parity data needed, either from raidcontroller or from the real cpu, in which case you are dealing with software raid 5.
I’m using raid 10 on mine and now have a 5 bay nas an use raid 6 on that one.
Since I can’t go for RAID 5 at the moment, I’m forced to go with RAID 1+0. But this will leave me with only half the space. And it ain’t more “secure” than RAID 5, considering that if you loose two disks in the same pair, you’re done. I have four disks, so RAID 6 is not an option, unless disks plugged in using USB can count in and be set up in RAID?
Hey Frank.
Sorry, your right, I was thinking about raid 6 and 60 as I had my eyes on 6 before going with raid 10.
Raid 1+0 or 10 is much more secure than raid 5. Raid 5 is secured using Parity calculations, while Raid 10 is true mirroring. Raid 10 has much better write performance than raid 5 as well, since there is no parity calculations taking place.
Raid 6 you have to Loose 2 “random” discs for it all to break, while raid 10 has to Loose 2 specifc discs for the raid to stop working.
Also much greater success rate of rebuilding raid 10 than raid 5 as raid 5 has to do a full parity check on all discs. Raid 10 does not have to do that, as it functions using true mirroing without parity.
I do understand people wanting to do raid 5. I did it myself for 4-5 years with great success. I’m just glad I had external Space for backup of the NAS when a disc broke and I tried to rebuild, as one more disc failed.
As a final note on storage. I don’t see Gen8 as a good NAS. It’s too expensive and too noisy. I’d rather go with a real Synology og Qnap nas or make a nas from an N40L or even an N36L (or whats its name)
Ohh, I see that now. Yes you are correct, RAID 6 can be done with four disks. Thought five was needed. I’m just having a hard time with loosing so much space to RAID 1+0. Bought four 4TB disks, in expectance of only loosing the space of one disk. Now I will be down to half. Bummer. Guess I’ll have to live with it. Or buy a new RAID card. If I choose RAID 1+0 and wish to change to RAID 5 at some point, will all data then be wiped?
Yes, data will be wiped if you change raid types from raid 10 to 5 or the other way.
If you buy a P410 at some point I’d strongly recommend buying the ram+battery as it will perform rather badly untill you do. Will be fine for storage without though.
And here’s HP’s official answer about high fan speed:
“Comment added: 12/4/2013 10:15:14 PM
Product working as designed.
Comment added: 12/4/2013 10:14:57 PM
Problem Description: Microserver Gen8 fan noise
Solution: Use controller in RAID mode
Additional comments: If using AHCI or Legacy controller mode, fan noise will occur. There is no possibility in lowering the fan speeds in this modes to a lower value. It is going to be BIOS/iLO safe ranges.
Comment added: 12/4/2013 2:46:34 PM
A customer advisory will be released in the next weeks.
Product working as designed.
Closing subcase.
I want to put 4 SSD the server, 1 for the os on the ODD en the 3 others for vms and datastore and 1 HDD for a daily back-up of the server.
The question is what SSD/HDD do i must use? I was looking for:
1x 60gb Kingston v300 for the os
3x 120gb SSD for the data store and vms, do i go for Samsung, crucial or kingston’? Don’t want to pay much.
1x 1tb wd. green/red or seagete,
That’s just sad Frank. I’ve noticed my fan goes between 32 % and up to 50 %. The high points are during startup but its still very noisy at 32 %.
Guess I’ll simply have to put in a better quality fan.
With your gen8, did you use the HP custom ESXi disks? Did it allow the stock RAID card to be used with VMware, or did you have to go with a 3rd party controller
Well, I’ve went with RAID 10 now that I can’t choose RAID 5. I’m booting from the internal USB port, running ESXi5.5. When I boot the server, the array I’ve created is seen (or the logical drive is), but when ESXi is booted up and ready, and I use vSphere to try to create a datastore, all disks are seen, not the logical drive. Along with that, the fan keeps running at 48%. Don’t understand it. What am I doing wrong, or what am I missing? If I enter Intelligent Provisioning or RAID setup during bootup, the fan goes down to 6% fan speed.
Maybe you need to configure raid when in Esxi / vSphere? Just an idea, as I use Hyper-V.
You can run Hyper-V for free as well now.
Did you configure ESXi using Intelligent Provisioning or how is that done with ESXi?
I don’t understand why RAID should be configured in ESXi, when it’s configured in HW RAID? I’m kind of forced to run HW RAID due to the fan speed problem. I booted ESXi from internal USB port as first run, and run ESXi installer, installing directly on the same USB key. So, no. Didn’t use Provisioning OS installation procedure.
Oh. Well, I started installing ESXi, and afterwards set up RAID, so don’t think so. But maybe ESXi is messing with the RAID in some way. I don’t have the experience with ESXi either to know if it could be ESXi tricking me.
Don’t know why my reply ended up at my last post???
Oh. Well, I started installing ESXi, and afterwards set up RAID, so don’t think so. But maybe ESXi is messing with the RAID in some way. I don’t have the experience with ESXi either to know if it could be ESXi tricking me.
No, ESXi does not interfere and it cannot do so. And no, you can’t configure RAID in vSphere. You have to use the Intelligent Provisioning. You also need to use the HP Customized ISO of ESXi, not the VMWare standard one as the HP one provides the correct drivers for Gen8 Servers. Furthermore, I would not recommend using the B120i with ESXi as unless you are using the P222 or P420i with FWBC, it will perform poorly in anything than RAID 0/1 without the FWBC anyway.
Where do I locate HP version of ESXi? In what way will I feel perfomance drop using RAID 10. I don’t have a RAID card other than the B120i, so for now I’m stuck. Not using HW RAID will result in fan speed at 48%.
Oh my, why didn’t I think of that, doh :O) I’ll take a look at that as soon as possible and return with the result.
For those of you out there who wish to install ESXi on your HP Microserver, here’s the link: http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/software/vmware/esxi-image.html
Thanks to Harpinder for stating the obious :O) I will be playing with this version in the evening. I’ll report back how it goes.
Harpinder, what is the difference between the P222 and the P410i?
The difference will be in performance and RAID options. Again, you can compare different RAID Controllers via the HP website.
Parminder, I’ve now compaired the two models, and it seems that they support the same RAID levels. The 420 seems to have more FBWC available than P222. Found the compairison chart here: http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01608507.pdf
What would you recommend? Have no idea performance wise, which one I should go for. There’s a small price difference between the P222 with 512MB FBWC and the 420 with 1GB FBWC. I don’t have great perfomance needs. I’m going to use the server for NAS, and running different virtual mashines when needed with different OS’s for reference needs. For now I’m planning on running a virtual mashine with Plex (not sure of OS yet, but maybe a Linux distribution. Also I’m planning on maybe running NAS4FREE. Also at some point, I’m planning on running a webserver (no more thoughts in to that yet). So performance wise, I don’t think I need anything big. But please do share thoughts and concerns that I maybe don’t see. I’m new to this world, so any ideas are welcome. Also want to use this server to train my self in server management. I’ve installed 16GB RAM and I choosed the Celeron processor, with changing to the Xeon processor if needed at a later time.
Using another card has a drawback of not being able to integrate it with HP’s iLO, but you can write custom scripts to look at the health of the HDDs, MegaCLI is available on all platforms and works well.
Bye,
Daniel
p.s.: You can also attach another 4 HDDs later one, but this card does not have an external connector, you will have to hack a miniSAS cable out of the housing to an external HDD-case. There are other options that have external connectors also, but they cost more and you have to search for them, but you will find it if neccessary. I have chosen M1015, if I need more HDDs I will take off the cards profile and hack the cable out of the house :-)
Daniel, thanks for your input, though I still think I’m gonna go with the P222 due to the fanspeed issue. Seams like the only choice if one wants the fan speed at 6%.
The HP ESXi version of course worked. Fan speed is now at 6%. Still noisy in my opinion. Think I’m gonna move the server out of my living room.
> Daniel, thanks for your input, though I still think I’m gonna go with the P222 due to the fanspeed issue. Seams like the only choice if one wants the fan speed at 6%.
I didn’t think the P222 solved the fan issue? I thought only the onboard B120i with suitable drivers let the system run at a normal fan cpu?
Why do you think it would fix it? I’m keen to give it a go, but the card seems a bit of a waste if it doesn’t (since I’m personally only using RAID1)
I have no proof to the P222 “solving” the fan speed issue. It’s my guess from the controller card being listed in the tech spec from HP. Guessing that the Sea of sensors works with the P222. Can’t prove it, unless others can confirm it working. I’m very close to ordering one, but am waiting a little time, waiting for maybe a confirmation that it actually works. Otherwise I will maybe contact HP support to have it confirmed.
ESXi does not support software raid provided by the Microserver. The only option to use Raid is using a dedicated raid controller. You set this up correctly, it is just a limitation of the Fake raid controller of the Microserver.
Guys, i’ve been thinking about my set up a bit more now.
Just bought the E3-1230-V2 to replace the stock cpu. I have 4 x 2TB WD Reds.
I was thinking, maybe put a 250GB SSD in the optical bay (i know it will run at sata2 speeds max), install Hyper-V 2012 on it and run WHS2011 as a vm guest. Then using the onboard B120i controller to create a raid 10 array with the reds.
It bugs me that only 2 drives will work at 6gbit speeds, but i’m guessing i’ll not really see any performance hits due to that.
The server will be basically to house all the family media and stream stuff to TV’s as and when necessary. I’ll plug an external dvd-writer in when cd/dvd reading is required.
Does this sound plausible for a home setup?
My original idea of putting a P410i in there purely for raid 5 AND full 6gbit across all drives is probably overkill.
Would appreciate anyone input on this please. Thanks :)
Why on earth did HP put a floppy connector where one would expect either a sata or normal 4-in molex to be for an ODD or SSD???
For the life of me i cannot find a female floppy to female molex power adaptor anywhere.
How have you guys installed either a SSD or ODD?
Hey Jacko. You wont notice any speed issue from the 6/3 connectors. 3Gbit is more than enough to populate combined bandwidth from your raid setup.
You don’t really need an SSD, but I understand why SSD is nice.
If you can place the server outside of your living room, it is a fine solution, but it’s way too noisy to place next to your tv.
Raid 10 is much better solution from an endurance and performance perspective but it does require more space than when running Raid 5.
IF you end up buying a P410 Card you should/must buy the extra ram and battery or the performance from that Card will not be better than the onboard one. HP fails to mention this.
Thanks for the input Morten. The server will sit in an understair cupboard so sound and airflow/heat isn’t an issue here.
I was mainly thinking of using the SSD as 1) its quicker, 2) its separate to the storage, so can be backed up separately.
Again, after thinking about it, not sure a P410 with extra ram and battery will be a worth while investment, just for raid5. Raid10 will leave me with 4TB of usable storage, which is enough.
Again, your input would be most appreciated.
Thanks.
It all depends on usage. If its mostly for media storage and file sharing I’d go for a NAS and then stream to some box placed at your TV. A box without fans and HDs. I’m using a Synology nas and a Boxeebox, but the boxee is old by now. – I don’t know which box would be good now.
I wouldn’t put anything with any fan or hd near my living room, but i’m really sensitive to noise, so thats just me.That said, the Gen8 really is noisy and remember that raid on 4 HDs means 4 HDs are spinning when your using it = way more noise than 1 hd. I can hear my Gen8 through a double-drywall – but again, I have rather good hearing :)
In any case, I’d start out with build-in RAID and see if it doesn’t fit the bill. If it doesn’t I could always upgrade at a later point.
Why on earth did HP put a floppy molex where they expect you to install an ODD or SSD????
I cannot find a female floppy to female molex adaptor anywhere, so looks like i’ll have to customise it.
Is it ok to cut off the male floppy connector and replace it with a regular male molex connector? I noticed the cables are slightly thinner that those from a standard ATX psu. Would it matter?
HI all, i am quite new to the ESXi. And i am now trying to install ESXi 5.5 to my Gen8 HP Microserver. but error “An iLO Advance License is required for continued use after server startup” is prompted. Do I really need to purchase the license? how much is it? Thanks
Don’t recall hitting that info when I installed ESXi 5.5. Do you need ESXi 5.5 by the way. Else go for HP ESXi version 5.0 which include needed drivers for handling fan speed. Otherwise it will run at 40-50% instead of 6% when using built in HW RAID. I’ve installed the HP version instead, and the fan is steady at 6%.
I just upgraded the Graphic Card in my Hp Proliant gen8 microserver.
I have added a Sapphire Radeon HD6450 2GB DDR3 64bit Passive LP and it works whitout any problem.
P222 has an internal and an external SAS connector. P422 has two internal SAS connectors.
Maybe take a look at P410 with 512 BBWC + battery instead. Should be cheaper and still more than powerfull enough.
I’m using P410. Works really well with the microserver, including Intelligent Provisioning and bios etc.
I’m using a small APC UPS, which I’d strongly recommend to filter out spikes and prevent bad shutdowns etc.
Yes, I own a Gen8 microserver and use a Xeon 1230-V2. I have mounted an Akasa k25 cpu-fan to make sure it was cool.
Fan right now is 39%. Normally at just above 40 it seems. I don’t know if it would be slower without the P410, but it has always been very noisy to me. I’ve tried every bios combination with no improvement. (not removed the P410 as that is pointless for me)
Is the fan speed controlled by BIOS/iLO? With build in HW RAID fan speed is pretty fixed at 6%. Else, it’s at between 42-48%. Sure not interessed in having the fan going up at over 40% if I use a P410. If that’s the case, I’d better go with the P222 which should support the sensors/iLO readings.
1. BBWC works as everybody knows. There is DRAM memory module which contents are retained as long as the battery has some juice left.
2. FBWC, on the other hand, works differently. It is an ordinary BBWC module with additional FLASH memory. It also needs a power source to operate properly but with much smaller amount of energy thus enabling capacitors instead of batteries to be used. The crash event in case of FBWC use goes as follows:
– no power on the machine,
– get data from DRAM stored onto FLASH using energy from EXTERNAL capacitor, called by HP “Super Capacitor”.
– wait for next power-up.
HP does say that Super Capacitor comes in exactly the same form as the Battery Module. They have different part numbers though: 587324-001 for capacitor, 462976-001 for battery pack.
My fan has never ever been at 6%. Not before I put in the P410, and not after either. I started out with the celeron, later upgraded to Xeon, and then later installed the P410 for better raid performance.
It has always been loud regardless of configuration.
I’m using newest bios/firmware/drivers for everything, so that’s not it.
My P410 shows up fine in bios and every other application, so don’t see how that would be different with any other raid controller?
About prices, you can get P410 with or without bbwc pretty cheap on ebay and such.
Hi fellas (again),
Right i’m using a 500gb SSHD plugged into the ODD sata port as my OS disk (i eventually sorted a molex connecotr out :)). My WD Reds are setup as raid 10 on the B120i. However when i try and install WS2012 Hyper-V R2, it can’t find any device to install to and wants the drivers loading. I have 2 logical arrays, so the 500gb SSHD is recognised and configured by the ACU at least.
1) went the provisioning route and the system just hung for hours when updating firmware on SAS drives. So i had to crash the server down.
2) When i tried again, it hung when trying to update to the latest version of provisioning
3) So, this is why i’m trying the old fashioned way of booting from installation dvd.
Any ideas what to try next please? I wouldn’t know what storage driver to go looking for or where to get it from to be honest.
Okay, so it’s then confirmed, that the P410 isn’t supported (at least not 100%), as stated in the technical document (where it doesn’t appear). Hmm, crap. My plan is to put the server away in a cupboard (and do some ventilation), but it’s not decided yet. So if it has to sit in the living room, I diffenetly don’t want the fan to be running at over 40%. I can still clearly hear it at 6%, with other equipment running in the proximity (PC which also is noisy). Guess I have to go with the P222 if no other card is compatible with the iLO sensors.
Thanks, useful to know, although i’ve sorted it now.
I managed to get the storage drivers downloaded onto cd then shoved that in the server and selected the correct ones. But it then said it couldn’t install onto either the raid10 array or the 500gb SSHD. It was then that i check in ACU and realised i’d not set a primary boot drive. Once i’d set the 500gb as that, it installed it fine.
Now i have an issue in hyper-v 2012 whereby i add a local admin, but when trying to add the password as requested, it just won’t let me type ??????????
Oh the fun of server installs.
Re RAID cards: The LSI 9240-8i is about the same price new on eBay as the m1015, but it also supports RAID5.
I got one, and it works, and I was able to flash it into IT mode, but I could not get a VM in ESXi 5.5 to turn on with it mapped via PCI Passthrough (VT-D).
I have a Xeon CPU now, and ESXi allows me to setup the passthrough, but it won’t start a VM.
Frank, it has 1 internal SAS connector. Same as onboard plug from your microserver. Standard is to use a cable splitting 1 SAS to 4x sata, so both is correct.
The P222 also has an external SAS (other plug I think) which can connect to an external enclosure to add more drives to it.
I would go for an adapter with 2 internal as I have 4 3½ drives + 3x 2½ drives internally in my server.
Frank, you are welcome to mail me or add me to Messenger. Just use my first name before @dintid.dk to find me.
Also have a some blog posts at itnotes.eu – None specifically directed at the microserver though.
Hi Morten. Yeah, the external is a serial SAS connector. Took some time for me to understand the internal/external principal, but this video showed it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMTnIGM_E5k
I can’t seem to find a P222 card with two internal SAS plugs, so I guess that I’m stuck with four drives, and one for the ODD, where I plan to place a 2,5″. Don’t guess that I can use the external SAS plug to convert to SATA connectors. Think it has to connect to another serial interface.
Can I use the cables already in the server if I buy the P222, or do I need to buy new ones?
Morten, I don’t use Messenger, so it will be by mail. I’m guessing you’re danisg too :O)
Played around with CentOS and Plex last night. Didn’t quite came through, but am continuing later today.
Hi again,
right, had issues with disk issues, so i replaced the 500gb sshd with a 120gb ssd. But now the bios screen says its not the required size hdd in bay 5 (odd)? Really?
Any ideas, a i don’t know why i’m getting kernal errors with the SSHD using the B120i
I thought I’d also post my thanks as I have recently bought the Gen8 server (after already owning an N40L, N54L & ML110 G7. I’ve upgraded the server to have the Xeon E3-1230 V2 (nothing toned-down), a 120GB SSD, some additional drives (one of which being 4TB), 16GB memory and an additional HDMI GPU which are all working fine.
I thought I would post some of my findings which may be helpful to others:
Server 2012 R2:
For those wanting to use Server 2012 R2 I found following installation of the OS you MUST immediately install HP C020926 which is an older driver for the RAID controller as the one installed by 2012 R2 causes the machine to blue screen and crash.
Some of the links posted above for the cable adapters required are in actual fact wrong, the slimline drives use a MINI Sata power connection and therefore you will need a cable to suit such as:
Most importantly it is worth noting that the drive is 9.5mm!! not 12.7mm slimline, the HP part code to use being 652241-B21 (although there are other 9.5mm drives available).
Hi Barry, I know most people won’t worry about fitting a DVD/RW drive, but I am talking about if you do want one don’t get caught out because the slim-line DVD drives actually uses a smaller type of SATA power connector (MINI-SATA) which I was completely unaware of, initially I ordered what you linked but have since realised that won’t work as its a regular SATA power size. In addition to this, the drive itself is also only 9.5mm not the more common 12.7mm slim-line.
After reviewing my order last night I’ve actually changed the cable I’ve ordered for the drive to this one:
Can you confirm that the cable you’re linkin to, is long enough when using the ODD caddy? Looks like a great clean solution. Got the caddy and the cable Barry links to from a friend, which doesn’t fit in the caddy plug. Don’t have the SATA cable either. Wasn’t aware that I needed it. So if it’s long enough, I’ll order it right away.
Ohh, and are you sure that the power connector is correct? Hard to see on the picture, and can’t see it from the description. Is it correct, that HP is using a “special” power connector? Seems smaller than the normal power connector used i ordinary computers.
Hi guys, just as a final thing on the DVD drive, it turns out if you order the HP one (part code above) you get all the cabling you could possibly need with it (a HP cable to power it from the floppy power etc) I’ve got mine all in and working now. Next on my shopping list is a 1TB SSD for my Hyper-V VMs.
Hi Folks, I am making research for my ESXi server and I am curious if someone passthrough GPU to VM. I want to make one of the VM the gaming/multimedia VM.
The cable included in the server for the ODD bay is a floppy drive power connector. HP uses this on some of their ODD drives, but it is uncommon on non-HP ODD drives.
It is. I bought a converter from “floppy” to sata and just fitted a molex instead of sata – I needed some molex’s :)
Your still welcome to mail me Frank, if needed. my first name before @ and dintid.dk after :)
Thankz Morten. For now I will post her. Maybe someone else can use yours and others replies to my questions. If I should have any questions not quite relevant, I will sure write you :O) Thankz again.
Well, I got my hands on a SATA cable (had the power converter cable already), and got a HDD connected. I’ve set up the disk as an array 0 (single disk), and I can see it in ESXi via vSphere. But I can’t add the disk. I get the error:
Call “HostDatastoreSystem.QueryVmfsDatastoreCreateOptions” for object “ha-datastoresystem” on ESXi “xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx” failed.
I guess it’s because the disk is formatted. I’ve used the disk as NTFS disk for backup (no OS on). Is this a correct assumption? Can I format it as something else, that will make it possible to get around this error. From the KB article from VMware in regards to this issue, it is mentioned that GPT could be the cause, and access to a CLI and throwing in some commands, could solve it. But I’m unsure of how I would do this. How do I get access to the CLI? I’ve tried connecting using puTTy via SSH. No response.
Hey Frank. I know it’s a bit late but for future reference, to get SSH, you need to go to the Configuration Tab then Security Profile, Properties, and Start the SSH Server Service. Then you can putty. While you’re there I’d select “start and stop service with host” so that it’s still up when you next reboot.
Then via putty you’d use vmfstools in order to repartition or reformat the disk.
the problem with 32GB for HP MS Gen8 may be in misunderstanding or misinform from HP what kind of UDIMMS are compatible, on single cpu servers and workstations U may use almost only (almost not on 100% its strange fact) SINGLE RANK UDIMMS (so not buffered or registered dimms like 1Rx8 or 1Rx16), if U bought dual rank dimms (like 2Rx4 or 2Rx8) it will not work, of course it also depends of installed CPU, but most xeons that fits on HP MS G8 is a single cpu limited CPUs so it uses only SINGLE RANK UDIMMS.
Why would you use single rank dimms when you can only get 4GB single ranks? The problem with 32GB for HP Microserver Gen8 is there are no 16GB Dual Ranks.
Technical Specifications
Capacity: 16GB
Form Factor: UDIMM
ECC: Yes
Pin-Count: 240
Organization: 2Gx72
Ranks: 2
Voltage for standart part: 1.5V
Low-Voltage part (L): 1.35V or 1.5V
Modul height (inch/mm) / 30
JEDEC Raw Card E
Speed-Options
some days ago I also installed my Intel Xeon E3 1230v2 in my G8, but iLO is always showing a temperature of 40 degree celsius – sometimes up to 46. But this can’t be the real temperature with a Intel Xeon processor under high load. I read in some forums, that 40 degree celsius is the minimum temperature and a bug of the iLO 4. Flashed v1.32 yesterday – still the same issue.
Someone have the same issue or maybe a solution, what I could try?
This is a great forum (though it really burns time on a Sunday afternoon).
I am running SBS 2003 on a N40L with three users and six computers. I was able to pick-up an oem SBS 2011 Standard for half-price to preserve some upgrade possibilities because I will not be going to the cloud and are into Outlook too deep to go without Exchange. I now realize my quiet, energy-efficient N40L is probably inadvisable for SBS 2011 — despite reports that it will load.
Although MS recommends a quad processor with 10gb as a minimum, anyone have experience or opinions on whether the HP MicroServer Gen8 using a g2020t will be sufficient for SBS light duty? Should I consider getting one with the possibility of upgrading to E3-1265Lv3?
Hey Mike. With so few users you will face no issues really. Just use 16GB of ram and a few fast drives.
When you have it all set up it’s not the CPU which is going to bottleneck you.. that will be drive IO.
I’m running Server 2012R2 hyper-v with 2 always on virtual machines, where one is Exchange 2013. Some time each day I have 1-2 other virtual machines running for backup and other tasks. Limitations always come Down to drive IO. So much I ended up buying an enterprise 480gb SSD!!
Hi Ben,
i’m checking your blog monthly to verify if there are any update about the healthy of your microserver g8 with the new processor.
Could you please let us know if you still have the xeon processor installed on and how it is going with it?
Hi, Luigi. I apologize for not making follow-up posts. The server is still up and running. I’m mostly using it as a ZFS / CrashPlan backup / media server at the moment which doesn’t produce a heavy load–but haven’t had any issues with it. Ben
Hi Ben,
thanks a lot for your reply, i just bought the processor, and i will install it as soon it will be shipped out :-)
I had a look at your problem, about the webserver, and in case you could not find a solution, you shall use a company i use for my virtual server: http://contabo.com/
they are the cheapest i ever meet in the market, static ip, and virtual server with 2 cores, 200 gb space, and 2 gb ram for only 7 euros (they are in Germany) per month.
Cheers
Hi I have the Xeon E3-1265Lin mine and it runs 24/7. Has 2 Exchange Servers and 2 DC’s. Runs perfectly fine. With RAID on the B120i it’s very quiet now. And no heat issues at all.
Hi, Frank. Here’s why the website is unstable… my landlord sold our house out from under us so I had to move my family on short notice and all I could get was a house in a rural area with no internet (there are actually no phone lines to my house), fortunately I do get 4G LTE via Verizon wireless so I got a Millenicom plan with a static IP and used that for awhile but I had trouble staying under the 20GB monthly limit so I bought someone’s grandfathered unlimited data plan, but Verizon won’t give me an un-natted IP address unless I pay $500 for a static IP…I don’t want to pay $500 for a static IP because I’m not sure how long the unlimited plans will last, so I moved this website to one of my servers at my friend Jeff’s house (he has Verizon FIOS), but he’s running an old HP Microserver N40L (great little server, here’s my review: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2NNXYLGZ2L9J0/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B005KKJPCO&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag=) but my website become too much of a load for it and the MySQL database or Apache processes keep dying with an out of memory error … we have quite a bit running on that server under VMware. Web server, mail server, ZFS server, mumble server, etc. It just needs more memory but we’ve maxed it. Last night I enabled vmware’s host memory cache so that it could cache memory onto an SSD so I increased the RAM on the web server from 1GB to 2GB and I’m hoping that will increase stability. Long-term I should probably switch it over to nginx instead of Apache… or just get a beefier server. Or maybe just sign up for one of those hosting providers and have someone else host it.
Ohh, I’m sorry to hear. Seems like alot of people is enjoying your website. What is the time horizon for getting the website up and running under whished for conditions?
Well, I have a Gen8, but my planned use, has been kind a shot down. Thought I could use it for Plex or something similar, transcoding my Blu-Ray rips to my PS3, cellular and tablets, but the processor can’t cope (Celeron). Wonder if the Intel could? Guess only an upgrade to the Xeon will help me, but the server is from my work, and I can’t begin changing components, when there’s still warrenty on it. So I got a Gen8, with 16GB RAM, four 4TB WD RED’s to no really use :O( For now the servers purpose is to serve some shares from a Windows machine run from a 2.5″ HDD in the ODD bay. Can’t figure out what else to use it for for now, other than run some systems for learning purposes in conjunction with work/education. Planing on installing Server 2012 R2 and play around with that. At the moment I got VMware 5.0 installed, and the one Win machine.
I have no idea what it would take to host your website in manpower/resources (never tried having a website). But if the timeline is reasonable and the handling/maintaining of the needed machines is manageable, maybe we can work something out. I have a public (static) IP address already. The server and the IP is in place already, at my place here in little Denmark. so economywise there should be no difference to me, hosting your website for a period. I don’t know with maintainance the website, if you can do this remote, but I guess that RDP sessions could get you access the the machines.
What do you think. If you think this as an option, we can continue communicating via email.
Thanks for the offer, Frank. That’s very generous of you. For now I’m going to keep it where it’s at (the least amount of work) and hope the 2GB memory increase helps. But if you notice the site going down a lot feel free to drop another comment to let me know.
I’m using an E3-1230 V2. I ran using standard celeron with hyper-v and a DC and an Exchange 2013 up all the time. I bought a bigger CPU as I sometimes have a lot more running, so wanted the extra horsepower when needed.
I havn’t used SBS for several years, so what’s included now? Regardless of whats in it, I don’t think you will have any issues as long as you don’t use it as a terminal/rdp server.
I’m using all cores with HT enabled. I don’t think there is a heat issue as my fan/ilo doesn’t function well with my Raid controller (HP P410). Just to be sure I bought and mounted an Akase 25 cpu fan.
Has anyone had any success using a HP Microserver Gen8, with the HP P222 in PCI-Passthrough mode?, I’m currently running a G8, with a P222, and a Xeon E1230v2. I’m having massive issues getting it to work, I’ve configured an array, and copied quite a sizable amount of data to it, and want to run it as a ‘virtual NAS’ and use 2x SSD’s on B120i in RAID1 with ESXi running off SD. However, it appears that its either not working due to ‘issues’ some people mention to do with Ivy Bridge based CPU’s or due to the P222 not being ACS capable (device not being able to passed through, due to on switched/shared PCI bus).
I’ve tried EVERY tweak/fix I can find running ESXi in Passthru for a RAID card that I can find, using v5.0, v5.1, v5.5, all seem to fail in different ways. Basically on a *nix VM with the P222 passed through to the VM (in v5.0 and v5.1) the OS of the Guest simply ‘hangs’ and detection of the hardware (udev timeout) and I have to wait about 1 minute for the VM to boot (usual 5-10 seconds), and on v5.5, it completely fails and cant register the device, however many people state that PCI Passthrough is completed screwed/extra-picky on v5.5
Any help, or suggestions, or other peoples experiences similar to my scenario as above, would be greatly appreciated. Not quite sure I want to have 12TB array in VMDK’s on a RAID5 just yet :S
I’ve had a P410 in the system, but couldnt get passthrough to work on that either, and also had a disk failure, and because of ILO4 not understanding HP P410′s (no idea why not!) yet, I didnt know about my raid failure (degraded) until about a week later, thus the hurried purchase of the HP Smart Array P222 card.. .
On a slightly related note, does anyone running a P222 receive a Critical temperature alert on the P222 in the ILO4 due to the temperature of PCI1 going to 103C (it auto-recovers and settles at 90~C after about 30 seconds).
Can’t answer the passthrough question, but according to Hp datasheet for the microserver, only the P222 controller is officially compliant with the microserver (look under ‘Storage controller).
Just want to share my setup with you guys. Firts of all, many thanks for this great info resource you shared here, It helped a lot.
I have a microsever gen8, formerly a G2020T but later on I replaced my cpu with an Intel Xeon E3-1230V2 and 16GB RAM.
Installed one GC Asus HD 6450 2GB. With ESXI 5.5 I wasn’t able turn on my WindowVM with passthrough to this GC.
I decided to upgrade my ESXI to 6.0 and after this, the passthrough to my Radeon HD 6450 is working fine. The only drawback I am facing is whenever that I need to remove the passthrough to the AUDIO HDMI because it lets the streaming with metalic sound and choppy. To solve the audio issue, I am using a USB Analog & Digital Audio Adapter MICRO II that I formerly used with my Turtle Beach Headset in my XBOX 360. For those who is interested in gaming in a VM machine I found this interesting article https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Multi-headed-VMWare-Gaming-Setup-564/
Hi Frank. They are not sold anywhere, that I’m aware of. If I get around to It (if my back allows measuring my server), I can make a drawing of it. Mine is still at prototype level, as my back is killing me. Going to have a “full” bodycast (back and one leg) on tormorrow, and for 3 weeks, so have to wait till after that, since my server is hidden behind a lot of stuff.
I can attache 2x 4 drives directly to the P410 I have. P410 accepts SAS drives, which the build in does not.
Right now, I actually have 3 drives in the ODD bay. 2 SAS HDDs which I run in raid 1 for Host OS. And a single SAS SSD where i’ve put my Exchange for now.
I have 4x 1TB WD RE drives mounted normally.
I just made a post at my site with the Photos I’ve taken of my server. Easier to explain that way :)
I have tried having Guest OS on alle possible different volumens, and never had any issues. Always installed using Intelligent Provisioning. Only very small issue I ever experienced is Provisioning cant find firmware for my P410 when looking for updates, but that is rather irrelevant for me anyway, as I want to update firmware manually.
I don’t think there’s any link filtering, everyone’s initial post gets stuck in a queue which I approve every couple of days then after that you’re a trusted poster. |:-)
I too picked up one of these a couple of months ago, and have been experimenting around to find an optimal configuration. Here are a couple of observations – all with an AC power meter connected. It’s a unit that handles power factor != 1, so Watts and Volt Amps are shown separately.
– The E3-1230V2 CPU works just fine, without deactivating cores or hyperthreading.
– I ran 8 concurrent instances of burnp6 under Linux while watching the CPU temperature using the lm-sensors. It got up to about 85°C. This bears little resemblance to the temperature indicated by iLO, which was showing something like 45°C! Note: this is an extreme test! Use cautiously and at your own risk! Under this test, power consumption hits 150W input (the PSU rating) for this fully loaded system with 4x 7200rpm 3TB Seagate drives, 1x SSD, 16G Kingston ECC RAM (2x 8G) and an LSI SAS9211-8i (reflashed in IT mode). No load, with drives spun down is about 50W, but 10W of that is just the HBA card.
– The minimum fan speed is a fickle thing. There are comments on a HP forum where the minimum speed is related to whether a HP disk is installed or not. This appears to be partly true: The BIOS appears to read the airflow temperature through the disk cage using SMART parameters on the disk, and adjust the airflow accordingly. If no drive is connected to the controller, or it is being operated in an incompatible mode the BIOS defaults to 39% fan speed just to make sure things stay cool. E.g. with VMWare 5.1 (HP image) running, connecting and disconnecting a blank drive on the single SATA position (slot 5) makes the system fan speed up and slow down again some seconds after reconnection.
– The next step is to pass the LSI HBA through VMWARE with the 4x 3TB to a VM running ZFS for Linux (Raid Z1). This obviously needs the Xeon CPU upgrade to access this hardware feature.
On max load (8 cores at 100%) for about 10-15 mins. I don’t anticipate the continuous load under VMware being anything like this, so was happy with this time. It was also how long it took for the CPU temperature to stabilise. From an engineering perspective, the 35W heatsink is not rated for this power (69W), but for my purposes and load scenario I’m happy to take the risk.
I used the Ubuntu package “lm-sensors”, and then just the ‘sensors’ command.
Passthrough for a LSI SAS/SATA 9211-8i controller through ESXi 5.1 into a virtual machine works fine too.
Ah kool i never got the pass through working for Im-sensors in ESXi always displays 100 degrees.
I ended up buying 1230v2 aswell, was initially worried but i haven’t been able to utilise all the cores with everyday use for long periods of time, so its been good in terms of heat
As you say, it just ticks along fine giving fantastic VM performance & responsiveness.
When I did the temperature testing it was without ESXi, just Ubuntu 12.04 directly. A live system will do.
As they are flogging these boxes for AU$349 (approx US$ 300) here now (ref Budget PC) I picked up a second one to use as a FreeNAS file server. The all-in-one solution was elegant, but just too risky. This way there is potentially a full kit of spares to get the other box going again if/when one breaks down.
With regard to access to HP firmware, they sent out a different email to people in Australia, after being fined $3 million by the ACCC a year ago for misleading consumers about warranty rights. It contained the following paragraph:
———-
Notwithstanding the above, our products come with consumer guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law (ACL). Nothing in this letter excludes or limits any right or remedy, or any guarantee, warranty or other term or condition implied or imposed by the ACL which cannot be excluded or limited. Therefore, if you are a consumer within the meaning of the ACL you may still be entitled to server firmware updates and SPP in accordance with your rights under the ACL even if you do not have an active support agreement, HP CarePack or HP Limited warranty. Please visit Contact HPand call our technical support team so that we can assess your entitlement. For further information on consumer rights, visit http://www.accc.gov.au/consumerguarantees.
————
I rang them to get them to “assess my entitlement”, but none of the various people I spoke to had any idea above the above recommendation. So I’m still trying to get myself registered as a ‘consumer’ with them.
I checked with intelligent memory, their 16GB modules are not going to work because of Intels lack of support in the chipset, specifically the memory reference code. Seems their 16GB modules have been approved for Atom C2000 based systems, so maybe worth to hang on for a box based on that platform
Please do let us know if you get the LSI working in PCI passthrough with ESXi; I couldn’t get my LSI card (9240 flashed into LSI 9211 IT mode) working in passthrough mode on ESXi 5.5.
I also couldn’t get passthrough working using an Adaptec 5405 which works fine in other servers. Possible issue with passthrough on the microserver? The latest patches fix the initial issues with passthrough in 5.5, have you tried patching 5.5 to the latest version?
The LSI9211 just worked in pass-through mode. But I had seen some other comments regarding difficulties getting it working with vmware 5.5, so stuck with 5.1.0 Update 1 with the HP custom image from September 2013.
Interestingly I had this box running Ubuntu 12.04 with ZFS on Linux directly on the 5th disk, and was getting scrub speeds of 500 MB/s using 4x ST3000DM001 in raidz (3+1) on the LSI controller. After I trnasferred an image of this OS configuration into a VM and passed the controller through into the VM the scrub speed remained the same. So the performance is fantastic, and making this storage available to other VMs using the vmware internal network connection removes the 100MB/s ‘limitation’ of Gigabit Ethernet.
I have an question about the supported memory. I have 16GB PC3-10600, but i think it is registered memory. This is supported or is there a way to still make it work?
Anyone noticed you now have to pay for Updates your HP equipment?
This one is on Microserver Gen8 drivers site:
Important note: HP ProLiant Server firmware access
Starting February 2014, an active warranty or contract is required to access HP ProLiant Server firmware updates. Security and safety updates do not require an active warranty or services contract. View your existing contracts & warranties or get help linking contracts or warranties to your HP Support Center user profile. To obtain additional support coverage, please contact your local HP office, HP representative, or visit Contact HP. Click here for more information.
I myself have just spend 2, almost 3 weeks trying to get a Service Contract on a piece of HP hardware, but nobody can sell one to me, as I’m not a business… this does not bode well!
Me too i noticed and i am no happy at all, hope this will not effect the intelligent provisioning as well, because having a service contract is a serious stuff, and costly.
It’s really sad, and nobody wanted to sell me anything as a private person. I had to buy it through a Company in my Family. HP is really alienating a lot of costumers this way.
Is it possible to assign more video RAM by adding a physical graphicscard to the server, and assign it to a virtual machine? I’m playing with XBMC on a Win 7 machine, and I’ve set video RAM to 128MB, but mouse movement and menu handling is really choppy. I was playing with the idea of running XBMC on this virtual machine as a master ( via UPnP), and running clients on devices which should give me some fuctions like remembering where I stop playback fx. Anyone here played around with XBMC and this master/client functions?
For those who have a 1230v2, has anyone tried to change the HP power profile in the bios to underclock it to bring it within the 35 to 50watt range, if so will this significantly degrade the performance?
Hello James. I’m using HTTPS just fine.
Only issue I’m having, if you can call it that, is HPs limited certificate choices where I can’t use an existing certificate I have.
Do you have any benchmarks of the AES-NI on your setup?
I’d love to see `cryptsetup benchmark` results, as I have a N40L which I don’t encrypt because it’s way too slow without this..
Hi recently bought a HP Proliant Microserver gen8 g1610t
My hardware configuration:
– Intel Xeon E3-1265L2
– 1x Kingston 8GB ECC DDR3 1600 System Specific Memory Model KTH-PL316E/8G
– 2x WD Red SATA 6 Gb/s WD40EFRX, 4TB (Raid 1 in Slot 1 & 2)
– 2x WD Green SATA 6Gb/s WD20EARX, 2TB (Raid 1 in Slot 3 & 4)
– 1x Samsung 840 EVO 120GB (In ODD Bay)
– Radeon HD 6450 Noiseless Edition
My software configuration:
– VMware ESXi 5.1 HP Version
– virtual Media PC
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bits
Samsung 840 EVO 120GB passthrough for OS
ATI Radeon HD6450 passthrough to Yamaha RX-V775 AV receiver (Sound & Video)
USB2.0 & 3.0 passthrough for keyboard/mousen en USB storage when needed
XBMC running movies from Virtual NAS
– Virtual NAS
XPEnolgoy 4.3 with virtual storage
Everything runs smooth, the ATI Radeion passthrough is really a nice feature :)
Sounds like a great setup. I had given up on the PCI graphics passthrough but it sound like you cracked it. I went for a geforce 210 but I think I will sell it and get a 6450 instead and try that too. Did you have to enter the pcihole settings on the vmx config?
Well i did have some problems with the passthrough in the beginning.
Please be aware that coping and pasting the PCIhole settings from the internet in the setting file doesn’t work.
You have to type it manually because the ‘ or ” is different when you paste it.
I’m not sure if I used both the start and end PCIhole setting. If you like, I can upload my config file so you can compare.
The ATI Radeon 6450 works great and is very cheap :)
Hey, Jeroen, I got the 6450 working which is good but I cant seem to passthrough the sound pci component (6400 hdmi sound). I’m using ESXi 5.5 U1. I’m going to try 5.1 next to see if it’s an issue with 5.5.
I upgraded VMware from 5.1 to 5.5 because of the 2TB store limit.
After the upgrade i had the option to create a datastore of 4tb but passthrough didn’t work anymore.
Not sure what i’m going to install now.
Reinstalling 5.1 fixed the passthrough for the USB 2.0 ports. So I’m down to two issues now:
1) No sound device found on my HD6450 (I assume because the HDMI audio PCI component won’t passthrough
2) Video playback is choppy
I’m going to resolve 1 by getting a USB-to-Optical out adapter and just avoid the passthrough issue.
Still investigating 2.
Hi,
When in AHCI mode, does ESXi see the ODD SATA controller seperatly from the main 4 bay controller?
I want to use the ODD SATA port for ESXI storage but pass the 4 bays through to a FreeNAS VM. I can’t use another SATA card as I already have the slot filled by an extra NIC I need…
Thanks, perhaps I wasn’t clear what I wanted to do…
I will use a USB boot drive anyway because you can’t boot from the ODD port.
I want to use an SSD on the ODD port that is for ESXi shared storage, used for many vmdk’s for many small VM’s.
For one VM only, I want to use all 4 of the front bays, without ESXi managing them, so the VM can access the controller/drive SMART status.
i.e. the B120i card in AHCI needs to be passed into a single VM using PCI-passthough (VT-d) but the ODD port needs to remain available…
Whilst it seems the B120i can be passed through OK, I don’t know if it can be separated from the ODD port, and if it works in AHCI mode…
After chaning my P410 to the compatible P222 my fan-speed are now properly controlled by iLo. It Means it right now is spinning at 29% instead of always going over 40%, which was very loud (in my ears at least).
I just swapped the Cards and the new one recognized my raid setup.
Anyone here got the two USB 3.0 ports working with USB 3.0 support? The USB 2.0 ports work fine, and I can connect 3.0 equipment to the USB 2.0 ports with no trouble. Only I don’t have the 3.0 support. USB 2.0 equipment work fine in the 3.0 ports. I have ESXi 5.0 with Win 7 virtual machines running on it. Not sure if it’s ESXi, HP IP or Win that should have a driver update? Wondering if I should install latest SPP maybe? I’m not running latest version IP 1.60. Think it’s 1.4 or 1.5. I have not yet tried to install a SPP, so that will be a first.
I’ve used USB3 with an external USB3 WD drive. Was with Server 2012r2 though, so sounds like software/driver issue. I can’t remember which port I used exactly, except it was USB3 for speed.
Hmm, played around with the USB disk. I was not entirely correct, when I stated that it worked with the USB 2.0 ports. The LED lid up, but the disk never appeared in Windows. I’ve now tried looking in the settings for the guest OS, and if I try to add a USB Controller, I can only choose xHCI, and I get a warning on this page stating, that “This controller is not supported for this guest operating system”. So guess it’s a combatability between ESXi and some Win OS’s. If anyone knows either a work around or what I need to do, to get this working, I’d like to hear it.
I’ve decided to switch over to my custom server build. I still think the Microserver is a great machine (except for requiring a license to use ILO), but I want more than 4 drive bays and don’t want to keep paying for ILO licenses. Maybe I’ll get another one when the Gen9s come out.
I’m having trouble making my USB DVD drive show up in my virtual machines. I’m running Win7, and it doesn’t show up in the add new USB unit section in VMware. Anyone having inputs to why I can’t get this working?
Frankly, the only way I got the passthrough working on the USB 2.0 ports (and for GFX) was to downgrade to ESX 5.0. I lost count of how many ESX installs I got through.
Sadly, I do run official ESX 5.0 from HP already :O(
Are you able to passthrough mouse and keyboard, i.e. is it just the drive not working? Or is passthrough not working at all? Has it stopped working?
I havn’t tried plugging in mouse or keyboard, but I’ve been using USB 2.0 HDD, and they work. Somehow I just seem to remember the USB 3.0 ports also to work, both for 2.0 USB HDD and my charging/connection cable for my Garmin GPS watch before. And they don’t work now.
Well, seems that USB CD-ROM/DVD drives are not supported as hot plug:
Doesn’t seem like it. I would like to turn it off too, but can’t find anyone who has found a good solution. People are duck taping it, or pluggin it out the LED of its fitting, and pointing it away. Some are even suggesting cutting the wires. Don’t do that though, since the LED fuctions as warning light if errors occur.
Anyone ever managed to install 2x 16gb blocks to a total of 32gb ram? Must say I’m on my way to looking for a new board due to lack of 16gb blocks, sad to say.
Also still really annoyed at the very noisy fan even though I actually bought a P222 as it should be supported and thus speed down the fan. But it didn’t compared to when I had an P410 raid controller.
Lack of support for 32GB is very frustrating, with a Xeon in and SSD for VMs its a very capable machine. Using dynamic memory within Hyper-V helps but it would be oh so much more capable with 32GB instead of 16GB. As for noise, I personally find it pretty good (bordering on quiet) especially when compared to my ML110 G7.
I’ve found several alternatives. All mini-itx and all with full management capabilities without extra license cost. All of them are build on Atom C2750 SoC (quad or octa core soldered on cpu – very capable)
1) Supermicro A1SRi-2758F – Supports 64gb ram, but it is SO-DIMM so going to be hard to find ram. I’d rather wait than buy this I think.
2) Asrock has a very promising quad C2550D4I and octa-core C2750D4I board. 64gb ECC udimm ram blocks. I’m currently talking to their supplier in Holland/netherland reagarding 16gb ram blocks.
3) Gigabyte just made a new board GA-9SISL. Supports 32gb (4x8gb) and has 4 quality intel ethernets.
the HP ProLiant Gen8 doesn’t allow hot-plug, i’m i right?
so does exist any BIOS mod to run that feature? didn’t find anything on the net (except for N40L und N54L).
Hi guys i have plan to buy Microserver and want to fill with more than 3 TB SATA drives, doe’s the server handle bigger disk or it’s limited to 3 TB only as HP stated
Thanks Ben i have another question, have you tried to burn installed Xeon E3-1230 V2 with burning utility like Prime95 or InteLburntest 2.54, if yes what temperature did you get. I recommend Hwinfo utility to measure temperature from CPU sensor and not use ILO sensors which is incorrect
Thanks for the tip on using hwinfo, I wasn’t aware there was an issue with the ILO sensors. I’d run a test with hwinfo for you but I’ve sold my Microserver and did a custom build around the DS-380 chassis so I don’t have access to one…. if you do find that information somewhere let me know as I’m curious. Preferably someone should run the same hwinfo test before swapping the processor out.
Do you know information about the 2 eth ports? One is shared with iLO? so is it true, that i cannot use the 2 gigabit eth port _and_ ilO at the same time? :(
As above, it has two Gigabit ports and the dedicated iLO port, I’ve also got an NC365T in mine so have a further 4 Gigabit ports. I’ve got 2 x 4TB WD HDDs in mine running without issue (no further configuration required)
NobertK, it is not possible to install 2x 16GB ram blocks.
I tried doing it with multiple different configurations of RAM. Both ECC and non-ECC. Simply just a no-go.
As an owner of the first N36 HP microserver, i was very content with the design and the fact that it was very silent.
Only the performance was not fit for the things I did with this server.
So exit N36 !
Your blog about the upgrade of the HP microserver Gen8 Celeron version is very usefull, and gave me the right rush to start the project again with this new Gen8 server.
So I ordered a Gen8 with Celeron, and the Xeon E3-1230V2 processor.
Celeron will be replaced by the new E3 CPU.
Purpose of the machine is running Hyper-V 2012R2 (gui version) as a hypervisor.
16Gb memory
4 x 3Gb WD harddisk in raid 1+0
On top of that a Windows 2012R2 virtual machine with DC function and Exchange 2013 as my mail server.
As an extra bonus the XPEnology Hyper-V solution to create a Synology virtual NAS.
Checkout this wonderful solution, if you want more info go to http://www.xpenology.nl/
(sorry, as far as I know only Dutch, but with screenshots.)
So I’m pretty curios how that will perform.
I will let you know if everything is uo and running
Anyway Benjamin, many thanks for your info concerning this brilliant piece of hardware, and the info about the CPU swap.
Heya Jan. Your setup is going to run very nicely. I know, as I’m running it now :)
Run 2012 R2 as Hyper-V host. 2012r2 as a DC and one more as Exchange 2013. I have a third 2012 as DC for other domain as well :¨)
I can recommend using Altaro Backup as it is free for ever for backing up 2 guest system. Using server backup for the host.
I actually ended up selling my Xeon and am running everything on the Celeron CPU!
I have 5.5 running on it but I have been unable to make the PCI passthrough to work. In some forums I’ve read there is a problem with passthrough and 5.5 but there wasn’t any technical details so not sure.
In any case I’m pondering a downgrade just to check.
5.5 definitely doesn’t work – the release notes detail this. 5.1 update 1 is the latest you can use. this is what I use – currently for HBA card but previously for GFX card
Benjamin, you say “I thought it wise to at least go into the BIOS and disable 3.7GHz Turbo, so the max we’ll hit is 3.3GHz.”
Did you mean the Turbo Boast option in the F9 BIOS ?
there is nothing mentioned about 3.7Ghz.
Yes, that’s the option. However, I don’t think there’s a need to disable it… I don’t believe the Turbo will engage unless only one core is in use so it wouldn’t contribute to thermal issues. Thanks, Ben
i think the cheapest solution to make a silent fan is to use a zenner diode at 6v , or 7v or 5v …. You can play using more diode @ diferent voltaje until you get a better vent at low sound
My G16010T was around 27-32% on the fans…I had an SSD on the optical SATA port and even had the native HP RAID 0 for this drive…finally put in 4x 3TB drives for storage only and put then on RAID 10…rebooted and presto it’s now running at 6%…I kid you not…
is it still working fine? :) I wanna get this and upgrade to Xeon but I’m not sure how’s going to last in time with that “monster” 69W TDP. Am looking to do some Plex Transcoding 1080p movies, any idea if it’s going to handle that?
I sold my Microserver awhile ago but I never had any problems with it. It will easily handle Plex Transcoding of 1080p… the Default Celeron should be able to do it as well.
Unfortunately the Celeron can’t handle 1080p, a friend of mine has it. It can do 720p no problems, but when it comes to 1080p it freezes from time to time. Of course, this depends on the needed output + subtitle, but definitely isn’t up for the job in most cases.
+1 to this. I’ve got the Celeron processor, running Plex on Ubuntu 14.04LTS on ESXi. I havn’t run 720p, but 1080p it can’t handle. I can see the processor running 100% at all time. I can run DVD’s.
Thanks for the info, well, then I stand corrected on the Celeron. I guess trans-coding must take advantage of the extra cores on the Xeon.
Well, Plex recommends at least 2.4 GHz (the Celeron is 2.3 GHz) dual core processor for transcoding. When running ESXi, plus a virtual server for Plex, plus any other virtual machines one should have, I guess we can’t expect the Celeron to be able to catch up :O) Man, I should had gone with the Pentium. Well, I just have to get the Xeon ;O)
I am about to buy microserver and since I only have experiance with synology, without using RAID, I have some questions.
I want to install VMware and use sever for backups, nas4free, LAMP servers and some testing and maybe some more things in the future.
1. If i configure 4x3tb WD red in RAID 10 now, will i be able to upgrade to M1015 card in the future without problems or will I have to configure something? What about uprgrading CPU to xeon?
2. Where should I install OS (VMware) on separate hdd/ssd/usb or on the same disks as virtual system will be runing (4x3tb WD red)?
3. Can i use ZFS with built in controller card and how do I set this up?
4. Also what benefits do I get using 2 1gb ethernet connections on 1gbps network?
Just to let you know (in case you want to update your table in the main post) that I have just installed a Xeon E3-1220 v2 in mine and it also works fine.
Super, it was very helpful while choosing a processor upgrade for my Proliant Microserver Gen8.
I’ve installed a Xeon E3-1265L V2 and the server is running centos 6 very smoothly now (4core with hyperthreading).
It’s a bit expensive but if it works it is worth the money.
But from what I read here it might not even be necessary, I will mainly use the Gen 8 to run ESXI running 2 VM’s (one running Ubuntu and one running expenology) and occasionally run some labs with 2 or 3 servers.
All I can add, is that my Gen8 is quite heavy loaded:
Xeon E3-1230 v2
16 GB Memory
1 x 120GB SSD
1 x 1TB SSD
1 x 6TB HDD
1 x 4TB
The HP 9.5mm Jack Black DVD-RW
HP NC365T (HP 4 port gigabit NIC)
HP TPM
And I’ve been running it like that for probably over 12 months now 24×7, with atleast 2 VMs always running (on top of the 2012 R2 host) with no issues on the standard cooling.
What is your % for the FAN ?
With the Celeron G1610T but with an additionnal RAID card (HP P421), i’ve got a 11% continuous FAN speed.
Wondering if th high TDP of this E3-1230 V2 CPU would give a much higher % for the FAN.
I have been following this page for a While and a couple of months back it inspired me to buy Xeon en do the upgrade.
With the information here it was really easy to perform the upgrade and everything seems to be working fine.
The only issue I have is the 40C temperature bug.
Is there any fix available for this?
I already upgraded to the newest ILO firmware and the latest firmware seems to be present on the server. (11-09-2013 bt there seems to be an A version also but does not seem to fix the issue).
I have run a stress test with stress linux from a bootable usb and after 30 minutes stress test it does not seem to go over 58 C according to LM sensors so I think I am safe, never the less I woul like to be able to monitor my temps in ESX which depends on the ILO.
They have posted the FTP link to retrieve the SPP.
You will be able to update your bios, ilo to 2.10 version and so on.
It might resolve your bug that i’m not aware of.
I am looking forward your feedback regarding your CPU fan percentage as I am also willing to buy such Xeon and noise is a concern.
Lots of problems reported with this SPP. Scary. :(
Anyway, just need the firmware. ILO already on latest version.
As soon as I have the updates I will post my readings.
Hi Vahad,
Sadly the firmware update did not solve my issue.
ILO still states 40C for CPU.
In the meantime I ran some tests with stress linux and with a windows live CD and prime95 and had some contradicting readings.
With stress Linux the sensors showed around 62 Celsius but with the Hirens boot cd and Prime95 I got over the 72 C and stopped Prime after 30 minutes when it started to hit 72 just to be safe.
I must say I had to use the HWiNFO to check my temperature as there where no other monitoring tools in the Hirens boot cd.
So I am not sure what is the correct reading.
When I had the server in my Study with enough room and ventilation around it, the sound of the ventilators was ok but now I have it in the electrics cabinet and I can hear it blowing through the door (the sound that is).
Anyway,
Hope someone here has a tip on how to get the temperature readings in the ILO working with the XEON installed as I have looked for weeks now without having any luck.
Looks like a pretty decent setup. It is good to see as its been a long time coming given the pace of computing.
I’ve been running VMware Fusion on n i7a Mac Mini for years- it cost me $900 then but they are now much cheaper. I added a SATA disk so it would run on a mirrored internal Apple RAID, which has never missed a beat. The twin 500GB disks have run 24×7 for 4 years now, so time to upgrade to SSD maybe. It has the lightening port so last year I added 16GB RAM and a drobo external RAID array for backup and possibly to run VMs on if it was stable and fast enough- which it is.
Of course I did this long before these mini servers came out. My experience with many of these cheap devices are the power supplies and oftentimes other bits fail in short order but I’m very happy with this quiet, low power setup I have for a standalone virtual host. I don’t have to mess with ESXi windows only client either, and I can use the Mac mini’s GUI as an emergency desktop as it has its own screen, whenever I need one (all running on a monster UPS). The Mini runs nice and cool too and is whisper quiet. OSX is well supported and my DRP is straight forward like with ESXi. Fusion lacks some features but its solid; I’ve never had a Host/Guest failure.
Once I got this running I was able to ditch my old HP ML370 ESXi 4.1 host, it blew such a gale none of us in the house could sleep! The internal RAID 1+0 SCSI array was pretty impressive and always filled us with confidence though. I reckon one of the 3 banks of fans in that thing used more power than the mac mini does. I didn’t ever have to turn on the room heater… LOL!
Hi, FCM. I sold my Gen8 Microserver awhile back. I didn’t like having to pay for an ILO license to keep the KVM over IP connected and wanted something a little more powerful. I’ve switched over to home-built Supermicro servers and I’m much happier with that setup (KVM over IP is free). I’m currently running this: https://b3n.org/supermicro-2u-zfs-server-build/ and also this which is about the same footprint as the Gen8 Microserver: https://b3n.org/supermicro-x10sdv-f-build-datacenter-in-a-box/
Ben, been really good reading your article, sime great ideas, hower some time has elapsed since it first started and I see the gen 8 1610T is back on for a good price but as most if the Xeons v2 listed are now end of life what would a modern alternative that works well be please?
If you don’t mind a DIY solution my latest Supermicro build https://b3n.org/supermicro-x10sdv-f-build-datacenter-in-a-box/ has the same form factor as the Gen8 Microserver using Intel’s new Xeon D. It is a pricey build but with 8 physical broadwell cores and up to 64GB 128GB memory it offers a lot of power in one box and very little power consumption. You could use an Avoton board to save money–however since you said the V2 is dated you’re probably looking for something more powerful like the Xeon-D build. For a pre-built supported solution like the HP Microserver I don’t know of anything that’s had a recent hardware refresh, I imagine most manufacturers are going to skip Broadwell and wait for Skylake processors and hopefully have some updated hardware for us next year.
Note, if you decide to follow my build take a look at the different motherboard options here: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon3000/#1667 as there are a few more out since when I made my build. There’s a few options on the number of cores (4 or 8) and number of Ethernet adapters (2 or 4), including some that have 10 Gbe adapters. I do suggest getting a model with a fan instead of the one I got.
Hi, these day’s its hard to get the cpu you mentioned. What other options are possible? i see that the V3 cpu’s are a bit easier to get, but do not know if they will work?
I’ve recently bought a “desktop” computer that’s like an iMac, however from the brand Medion. In this computer I got a Celeron J1900 cpu. Is the Xeon E3-1220 v2 possible to be put in to this computer and replace the Celeron J1900. Can’t find any info on this anywhere and you seem to be a knowing guy.
Hi, Ludvig! I believe the J1900 is a SoC (system on chip) so it won’t be replaceable. Do you need more speed than the J1900 can provide? It’s a quad core so it’s not terrible but it’s designed for low power usage so you won’t get a lot of performance but it may be enough depending on what you’re doing.
Hey! I ended up returning the computer because it couldn’t handle photoshop and revit that good and that’s what I wanted to use it for. Thanks for the help! You’re answer helped a lot in the decision!
What’s your thoughts on this build over a n40L with 16GB RAM?…is it worth the upgrade?
I have 2 machines which I’m trying to consolidate into 1 as I only need it for Studying. (1 n40l & an overkill AMD 8320,32GB beast!)
was looking at installing the 1265L in a gen8 with 16GB ecc RAM. any suggestions?
Hi, Adi. Probably the main difference between the N40L and Gen8 HP Microserver is the CPU speed. I think it’s worth it to have a faster CPU but it really depends on what you’re doing. If you’re looking for a lot of power in microserver size you may want to look at doing something like this: https://b3n.org/supermicro-x10sdv-f-build-datacenter-in-a-box/
I’m running the Gen 8 with a Xeon E3-1220 V2 and it runs fine.
Lese days the ambiant temperature was over 25 °C and the processor temperature did not exceed 42 °C.
The Gen 8 is used as both a file server and a host for Hyper(V and is currently hosting 3 VMs running W10 Pro.
Hello Ben,
I see you had no issues upgrading to e3-1230v2. I want to do the same with my ml310e server, but i am concerned will the non-FIO xeon work normally? Did you buy your 1230v2 CPU as a FIO processor kit from HP, or did you take any regular xeon CPU from retail? Thank you in advance! Cheers…
Hi can I combine 4gb and 8gb memory modules, server has 4gb RAM and I want to buy another 8 gb modul kingston KTH-PL316E/8G it will work in dual channel then?
Hello, thanks for your very interesting post, but you should edit your recommandation because Core I3 do not support ECC memory (which is important for ZFS which is a frequent use case for HP Microservers)
Talked with HP, i live in Europe, scheduled End Of Life (EOL) for HP Microserver gen8 is 2017 june 30. So probably until then there will be no info about next gen microserver. Which is very good low budget home lab server,
So interestingly, I have been running 2 x Kingston KTH-PL316E/8G sticks in my Gen8 for ~3 years with the Pentium G2020T, with that same ” DIMM X could not be authenticated as genuine HP SmartMemory” etc, and it works fine.
Yesterday I got my hands on a cheap Xeon E3-1230 v2 and installed that, and the server won’t boot past the “Checking Intel QPI/Memory” post screen with the Boot Code 0114. Googling implies that you MUST use genuine HP SmartMemory.
Given how old this post is I’m not expecting a reply, but wondering if you had to do any tricks in the BIOS (not that I can see any options) to get it to work? Additionally if anyone else is thinking of doing this upgrade, you may need to consider the cost of real HP memory as well.
Hi I know its late in the game but I wanted to give a BIG shout out to Benjamin Bryan for this blog I was going back and forth about what processor to upgrade my gen 8 to and after reading this blog I got the 1230 v2 and boy am I impressed! Maxed it out for 6h with turbo switched on also server is fully loaded 4 spinning rusts 1 SSD 1 PCIE Dual port gig card and Micro SD card power not a problem and CPU Temp maxed at 60c. The temp stays at 40c during normal operation and also I might add the fan speed never went above 16% during tests. Had to look over at it to make sure its still on lol, This is one serious bit of kit for the money. So thanks to Benjamin Bryan and everybody in the blog.
Did you have to do anything special to get the new Xeon working? I bought a ‘working’ 1230v2 on ebay, but can’t get it go on either of my Gen8 Microserver’s. It tried to boot, but fan shuts off immediately and the light on the front flashing red quickly.
Looking on the iLO logs it says power failure, but it must count for something that I can get into iLO. Boots fine from the stock G1610T…
It looks like you got a bad CPU.
Can you try it with a desktop mùaintbord, just to be sure wether it works or not.
Did you check the intel marking on the chip top, just to be sure that you got a true 1230V2 chip ?
Hey all, I’ve had a gen8 for some time. found an E3-1220 V2 I installed and works fine! looking to throw more RAM at it. ECC stuff, why doesn’t the gen8 support registered RAM? Is that CPU or Mainboard related?
I’ve seen the same thing. If you search for “ILO stuck at 40c CPU temp” you’ll see it’s a common theme, although some report it changing slightly, suggesting that it’s a sensor on the motherboard close to the CPU heatsink that doesn’t properly measure.
My logs suggest that it hasn’t changed in a year while every other temperature has. The ACPI Thermal Zone does however measure the CPU’s package temperature (x86_pkg_temp) . The fan speed does not appear to be locked but it might be that adjusting the cooling options in the BIOS would be necessary if you have e.g. a high-powered CPU replacement.
Here’s the thing: the Celeron doesn’t appear to really “support” it, either, looking at PCI capabilities. It seems like it’s handled by the C204 chipset’s PCH. I know what Ark says, but it’s just a database maintained by Intel, and it would be quite possible to say that “we’re only going to sell this CPU with this chipset that handles ECC”. After all, how many G1610T have you seen elsewhere?
Thank you for the blog – i ended up going with the Intel Xeon E3-1260L 8M Cache 2.4 GHz SR00M (2.4Ghz – 3.3Ghz, 4 core 8 thread) processor and 16GB of ecc ram.
I noticed the large system fan was making a “clicking” noise, this has been an issue for others in various blogs i’ve read so i thought i would share my experience here to help others..
So i took apart the fan, cleaned it / re-greased and put together… noise was even worse…
Search for a replacement there were a lot of “refurbished” HP fans on ebay / aliexpress for £80+ which i didnt fancy paying so i purchased the Noctua NF-P12 redux from amazon..
Now, as the Noctua NF-P12 redux doesn’t have the HP Fan connector i had to rewire the HP connector from the original fan to this one.. it worked and booted up just fine, was ever so silent BUT cpu temps were constantly in the high 55c – 60c at idle and around 69c on full load.. the fan was able to boost upto a maximum of 1700rpm which simply wasn’t pushing enough air out…
I then purchased a generic version of the orginal fan (AFB1212SH) for around £14 on ebay, this arrived a few days later.. i rewired the HP connector once again to this fan.. expecting it to work just the same as the original however i kept getting “fan not detected” on boot and the system kept shutting down..
so, i then took apart the new AFB1212SH, pulled out the bearings and the fan head itself and replaced the original fans components wiith these ones… rewired the HP Connector back to the original fan …
plugged in everything and pressed the power button…
Click.. it switched on… posted… boosted up and then went into the OS, speed dropped to 13% and it’s been stable as a rock with CPU temps @40c on idle / 50c @ full load with no more clicking and the fan pretty silent..
so.. if anyone has the same issue with their fan being very noisy (clicking etc) just buy a AFB1212SH off ebay, take out the bearings and replace in your existing fan… job done.
Currently running 16GB of generic ECC ram.. 5VM’s on ESXI 6.7..
I know these machines are getting old, but one came up for a great price. I upgraded the RAM, then the CPU to an E3-1270 v2. That also meant I had to figure out active cooling. Trickier than I thought, but lots of help online. Here are some of images of what I had to do to get it work(in no particular order). Now? It’s a very capable machine!
Hi Ben,
Thanks a lot for your post. I also bought the G8 Microserver and there is pretty much zero information about CPU upgrades on this server (every blog just mentions its possible to upgrade but no one actually did it).
Your blog finally answered my question and I will proceed with the upgrade.
Cheers,
Filip
Basel, Switzerland
Filip,
Thanks for the comment! Glad it helped, if you do it on yours let me know what processor you use. BTW, I use ILO4 for the console so I have no idea if the video still works with the Xeon E3 since it doesn’t have onboard graphics (I don’t have a VGA monitor to test). The motherboard is based on the C204 chipset so in theory these processors should be compatible (obviously look at max TDP): http://ark.intel.com/products/52804/Intel-BD82C204-PCH, but I did notice at the bottom of Supermicro’s C204 they suggest not using an E3 with onboard graphics (E3-xxx5 series): http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon/c202_c204/x9scm-f.cfm I have no idea if that limitation is specific to Supermicro’s implementation or if the same applies to the motherboard used in the Gen8 Microserver.
Thanks.
Ben
Ben,
Thanks for your comment as well. I just ordered the same one as you have (E3-1230 v2) since the slightly cheaper E3-1220 v2 is not worth it (price/performance ratio due to 4C/4H). I wish I could use the version 3 Xeons but I think they are not socket compatible (1155 vs 1150). I am also thinking about upgrading the heatsink with something low profile like the Noctua NH-L9i (if it fits) and power it from the P3 cable intended for the optical SATA drive that I don’t need.
Just wondering, did you buy the iLO essentials license for your G8 server to get it up the console running?
Thanks,
Filip
Filip, that’s right, the V3 Xeons are not compatible. One problem you might have with the Noctua is it blows straight up and there’s not a lot of room above the CPU, I think it will fit but you might be better off with a fan designed for a 1U server that blows air towards the back of the case.
Maybe something like this: http://www.amazon.com/Dynatron-K2-Server-Workstation-Active/dp/B004HSSKBW/ …it’s actually rated for 73W so it would support the Xeon E3.Update: I just remembered the heatsink is mounted with screws, not pushpins, so maybe this instead: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005OYEU7G/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B005OYEU7G&linkCode=as2&tag=b0df7-20I used the 60 day trial version of ILO4 Advanced and got VMWare installed, you can get it here: https://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/try.do?productNumber=ILO_EVAL
I must have messed up my trial because it now says no license is installed, I was in the BIOS looking at all the settings and I know I adjusted the clock so maybe that invalidated the trial license. What’s interesting is with no license installed I can still get access to the console for 40 seconds at a time, then it will kick me out with “An iLO Advanced License is required for continued use after server startup.”, but as far as I can tell I can reconnect as often as I want for 40 seconds at a time. I can even connect for 40 seconds from the Android App.
One thing that does require the Advanced ILO license is remotely mounting media or an ISO file from your computer. There is no DVD drive with the server, so with no ILO4 license the only way to mount media is to physically plug a USB flash (or USB DVD drive if you have one) into the server and boot off of it.
I don’t want to mess with that so I bought an ILO Advanced 1-year subscription off of ebay, you can get them for around $35 and I think they work with ILO4. I haven’t actually tried entering the key yet so I don’t know that it works, my plan is to not activate it until I need it because chances or I will go a year or two without needing to remotely mount media.
If you do install a fan let me know how it goes, I may do the same thing. I don’t know of an alternative but the fan will always go at the same speed with the P3 cable, there’s no temperature / fan speed control, are you going to try to throttle it down so it’s not always running at full speed?
Thanks,
Ben
Hi Ben,
I am back with an update. I have finally received the E3-1230 v2 (box version) and it took me maybe 10 minutes to install it (the old heatsink was a bit stuck).
I have disabled the turbo option as 3.3 GHz is more then enough juice for my needs and I don’t see any issue with the stock HP passive heatsink yet.
Btw, your blog is probably the only one on the net that describes the CPU upgrade – thanks again for being the first one to try it :-).
I will let you know once I obtain the iLO license as I am waiting for the dedicated HP PS1810-8G switch for this small beast.
Cheers,
Filip
Hi, Filip! Thanks so much for the update! Always glad to be on the bleeding edge, I’m getting a lot of hits for this post, I probably should put some ads up. |:-) If you get that switch can you try out teaming the Network adapters in the Microserver? One thing I’ve always wanted to do is team the gigabit NICs on my desktop and the server and see if I can get around 150MBps transfer rates between them.
Thanks,
Ben
Hello,
I believe you are right that updating the clock after installing the ILO4 license will cause the license to expire.
So I think the best solution is to use the 40 second free access to set the clock before entering the license for the first time.
I did as you did and had my license expire, but you can reset the iLO to factory defaults which will restore you ability to enter a trial code. This page
http://www.tricksguide.com/restore-reset-ilo-to-factory-default-settings-configuration.html
describes the reset, and option 4 can be performed via the iLO itself (the 40 second timeout doesn’t seem to apply until after the machine fully starts up).
This will reset the login to factory default, but you can then re-apply your trial license.
Good info, thanks!
Well, it isn’t just an explicit time reset that clears the demo license.
I reset the the iLO to factory defaults and reinstalled my demo license. I then installed an OS and began to set things up. A day or so later the license had expired again.
The only thing I can see is that at every power up (can’t recall if wall power was removed or if this was just an OS reboot, I was moving the server around so it might have been the former) I see:
On-board clock set; was 01/01/1970 00:09:17.
This entry shows up 3 times, then 13 hours after the third occurrence I get:
License expired.
But this was only a day after the initial license install (and less than a week after it was generated at HP’s web site). The license didn’t truly expire, but for some reason the iLO thinks it did.
For now I haven’t reinstalled it as I’ve got the host basically set up. I do have an iLO advanced license I bought on Amazon for about $40, but I am hesitant to install it as I don’t know if the same thing will happen there.
Has anyone installed a non-demo license and had it persist (or even a demo one)?
Thanks.
That’s one thing I don’t like about ilo… The risk of dealing with licensing when your server goes down and you really need it.. Supermicro motherboards with ipmi don’t require any licensing.
Hi Ben, you can just install the license! After 1 year only the support expires! The license itself never expires neither do the functions you get with the license! :)
You have got to be kidding! I could have just installed the license and had it forever?!
Yes you could’ve already installed the license haha!
You can ask with HP but they’ll tell you the same thing, you pay for the license and after 1 year (or 3 depending on which you buy) only the support with HP expires but the functionality you get with the Advanced license will never expire!
So if you really want the HP support you’ll have to buy a new license again after 1 year, if you don’t care about that like me you can go ahead and install that license! :)
Well thanks for the info! I wish I’d known that earlier… I probably wouldn’t have sold my Microserver. I could care less about support–I just want to be able to install an OS remotely. Well, at least when the Gen9’s come out I’ll have a license I can apply. |:-)
Hi Ben!
Thanks for your post, it really got me going for Gen8. HP should send you a free server for this post, because I’m sure I’m not the only one who is thinking about buying because of your post.
I am planning on buying the cheapest version with the G1610T Celeron CPU (to make it at first cheap), so I try it out and upgrade to E3-1220L v2/v3 if more CPU is needed.
I’d have some questions:
1. Why are you thinking of a fan with the new CPU installed? Is it important?
2. Do you think this server will accept 2×16 RAM? Are you perhaps sure about this? By any chance do you know what kind of RAM would be the best in this case?
3. So you say that I can remote manage the server for 40 seconds per session forever, without buying a licence? (I can live with that) I understand that virtual disks cannot be mounted, just in the trial period, but that doesn’t matter.
4. Do you think virtualization is possible with the G1610T with VMware or Hyper-V? Just checking, because I just might not order the new CPU yet.
5. As a Gen8 owner, do you see any drawbacks of the server? I want to use it as a home media server, fileserver with bitlocker or other encryption, sync server to bittorrent sync etc. So many things come into mind :-)
Thanks,
Daniel
Hi, Daniel. You’re welcome. I’ll take a free Microserver from HP any day! I agree, the G1610T is the way to go, the G2020T is marginally faster and probably only worth an extra $10.
1. For the fan I don’t think it’s necessary based on the temperatures I saw on my load test, but I like to do things by best practice when possible so if there’s a way to get a fan in cheaply it’s probably worth doing. In practice I don’t think it will be an issue, I know the server can take a full load for 10 minutes on a hot summer month and not overheat, and I also know that my load is light.
2. I don’t think so unless someone makes 16GB non-registered DIMMS, I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure the C204 motherboards require un-buffered (non-registered) memory and I haven’t seen any that are more than 8GB on the market (if someone finds some let me know). I bought two of these: http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=W8GE1600KI I only run ECC memory, maybe there is some non-ECC that would work for people that care less about data integrity. VMWare also helps alleviate this issue since you can balloon memory and swap onto an SSD.
3. Yes, as far as I can tell. So far it has let me connect a dozen times for 40 seconds at a time, and I can interact on the keyboard and such. I think it would be good enough to install an OS.
4. The G1610T is not your grandfather’s Celeron. It is very close in performance to an i3, and it does support virtualization. I ran VMWare on the G1610T before swapping the processor (I think you’ll be happier with VMWare, I’ve tried both and Hyper-V is not easy to setup, it really wants a domain controller, I finally got it to work without one and the disk performance on Ubuntu servers was considerably slower). I’ll post more details on my setup in the future, but on the HP Microserver N40L which is half the speed of the G1610T I’ve run a Napp-It All-in-one ZFS server for my RAID/NAS, shared the storage back to VMWare via NFS, and ran half a dozen Ubuntu VMs on top of it without issues. If you want to run a heavy database server or run 100 users off an Exchange server you might want the faster processor. The most important feature the Xeon E3 will give you on virtualization is VT-d which lets you pass a device (such as a RAID controller) directly to a virtual machine. This may or may not matter to you. Traditionally this was done for database servers that required heavy IOPS. Now days there is very little, if any performance difference between VMDKs and raw access to the drives.
5. Main drawbacks: Having to license ILO4 for some features I think should be standard rubs me the wrong way. If I have a server down the last thing I want to deal with is licensing issues. Supermicro boards have IPMI built in (but not in this form factor yet) which gives you remote media and KVM over IP for free. Only supports 16GB memory (that we know of). Only one PCI slot. That’s all I can think of now, for bitlocker there is no AES on the G1610T so you won’t have hardware assisted encryption. Sounds like you might want to take a look at http://www.nas4free.org/ as a potential VM.
Thanks,
Ben
Hi Ben!
Thanks very much for the very detailed answer!
If I buy the 1220v3 CPU then I can apply the included passive cooling and heatsink on it or do I need to buy anything extra besides the CPU (new heatsink or passive cooling)?
Also, do I need any special equipment (silicone or anything) for this? I need it for the CPU change, right?
I am not a real HW guru, but this is worth trying ;-)
Thx,
Daniel
HI, Daniel. Don’t get the V3, it’s based on the newer 1150 socket and isn’t compatible with the 1155 socket in the Microserver. For Xeons you want one that ends in a V1 or V2 (V2 is the newer Ivy Bridge). I’ve updated the post to show a list of processors that should be compatible along with the TDP rating (stock heatsink is designed for 35 watts). I found the stock heatsink was able to handle 69W in my environment so you probably don’t need a CPU fan (might be another story if you’re running the processor at 100% on all cores for hours on end). Just watch the temperature and if it starts to get hot disable one or two cores to bring it to 35W or get a fan. I used this Cooler Master paste, $5 at Amazon: http://amzn.to/14bN93p I think just about any CPU thermal paste would work. I used rubbing alcohol to clean the old paste off the old processor and heat sink before applying new paste.
Thanks,
Ben
Thank Ben!
You gave me answer to just about anything. I have ordered the thermal paste and I will be using the same CPU as you did.
1 vote for Ben to get a free server! :-)
Thanks vey much,
Daniel
Hey Ben, thanks a million for the review and I will be buying as a result of your input :) I have a question about your above post where you mention the onboard graphics of the CPU. Are you sure the server even uses the Intel graphics? According to the specs, there is an ancient Matrox G200 GPU. Do you think its possible to make use of the onboard intel GPU via the VGA?
You’re welcome Senator, I’m not sure, I didn’t realize it had an onboard GPU so it will probably work without an HD graphics processor… If I had a VGA cord for my monitor I’d try it but I’ve gone to HDMI cables. Ben
Hi, are you able to advise if the celeron model supports pass through of the drives? I want to direct pass through my storage drives to a freenas VM under ESXi?
The Celeron won’t do VT-d, you’ll need a Xeon E3 to do passthrough (VMDirectIO). But you might be able to use this RDM mapping hack… http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/25/rdm-mapping-of-local-sata-storage-for-esxi/ I don’t really recommend it, could lead to data corruption, etc. so getting a Xeon E3 that supports VT-d would be better. The best way to do VT-d is to pass a RAID controller to the VM, I’ve use the IBM ServerRaid M1015 flashed into IT mode which is less than $100 on eBay.
Also look into http://www.nas4free.org/, it’s the successor to FreeNAS and is based on the latest version of ZFS and FreeBSD 9.
In my tests I have found VMDKs to run just as fast as VT-d pass-through so unless you really need to give NAS4Free direct access to the disks for SMART monitoring and spindown and such give VMDKs a try. There’s a little more CPU overhead but the Celeron can handle it.
I finally got a an M1015 to install but I’m now torn between using the card or using the slot for a Radeon GFX card with passthrough for my VM media centre. Oh I wish there were two slots!.
On the nas4free front, it installed very easily but I’m not finding the performance great with the two VMDKs in a ZFS mirror. I’m just copying/restoring 600GB across my Gigabit network to the NAS (via SMB) and it’s suggesting 18 hours. That sounds pretty slow to me and it may be down to the network, of course. However, the transfer seems to go in bursts, like nas4free is taking its time writing the data. Odd.
I’ll probably try some local tests, e.g. transferring some data via USB drive to eliminate the network effect. Any other ideas gratefully received!
(P.S. I may also have an M1015 available to a UK buyer – at the market price, of course…)
Dear Ben,
May I install one 2.5″ disk on DVD bay ?
Hi, Anderson. Yes, there’s room for a 2.5″ in the DVD bay, you maybe able to use the ODD SATA port to drive it but it won’t be 6Gbps. Ben
Hi Ben,
Does the ODD slot have the SATA data and power cable?
Thanks
Hi, No SATA cable. there is a power cable but it’s a mini 4-pin designed for the DVD drive.
It would be very easy to run a SATA cable from the ODD SATA port on the motherboard up to the ODD bay. If you’re trying to power a regular hard drive there’s a molex power cord just under the ODD bay that plugs into the storage array, it would be easy to intercept it at that plug and put in a molex power splitter.
interesting.
any picturer’s or a how to put a 2,5 in place of the ODD :)
No pictures yet, as long as the ODD sata port can run a drive it should be possible.
Hi,
I can confirm that a molex power splitter works there. You have to think about where to lay your power cable for the 2,5″ HDD though, as HP seemed to intentionally have constructed this bay to only house its own products… ;-)
In my case, the integrated SATA controller has to be set to legacy or AHCI for the HDD to be detected and bootable (I am using a Adaptec 3405 for RAID 5 anyway :-) ).
Cheers,
Patrick
the Stock heatsink may hold up with the new processor BUT that doesnt mean the power circuit on the motherboard for the CPU will with a new CPU thats double the old TDP values… you want to stick as CLOSE as possible to the stock TDP value to avoid problems…
10 minutes isnt enough time to stress test it… you need in excess of 2 hours running in your warm room to SEE if you will have issues….
successor to FreeNAS???? huh… FreeNAS is now a project of IXsystems (has been for a few years) and is running the LATEST ZFS (v28) and the new version thats in RC is 9.1 of FreeBSD..
latest stable version is FreeBSD 8.3 i believe.
Thanks for the comment, Harry. The motherboard in the Gen8 Microserver is an Intel C204 which is compatible with Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors in the Xeon E3 series up to the 1290 (which is 95W). You’re right that 10 minutes isn’t long enough to properly stress test.
Wikipedia has an article explaining the history of FreeNAS and NAS4Free: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAS4Free#History
Ben
Why not go for the PROLIANT ML310E GEN8 1P XE E3-1220V2 instead? It has the CPU you want and it supports 32 GB RAM. Form factor maybe..?
Hi, Magnus, Yes, for me form factor and noise are a primary factor. Otherwise I can’t think of a reason to get a Microserver over the ML310e (or something else the same size), especially with 32GB support. Thanks for making that point which is probably often overlooked.
The one thing that I’m seeing as a drawback to the ML310e versus the Microserver, is the lack of bundled HD caddies and the actual cost to purchase them. They don’t appear to be readily available and the ones that are look pretty pricey. If anyone knows where to find them cheaply, I’d love to know. That could be the deciding factor for me going with the ML310e with the E3-1220 v2 already installed.
I currently have a N40L and waiting untill the Gen8 is availible in my country.
My biggest conecrn is still the amount of memory 16gb max due to the Udimm (unbuffered).
I found only 2x16gb (32GB) UDIMM ECC Brand :
http://www.ramcity.com.au/buy/ramcity-32gb-pc3-10600-ecc-unbuffered-240-pin-dimm-kit-2x-16gb/2xCVZ-MAC
Hi, Richard. Good find! If anything works that memory would (I don’t think it will work, but that’s the best chance we have). Unbuffered, ECC, and 16GB DIMMs, that’s the first I’ve heard of a product like that. The question is who’s going to be the first to risk $500 to try it? Ben
Here is the reply from the mail I got from them…
Hi Richard
Thank you for your enquiry.
Prepare to be surprised. They are single 16GB modules and we have been selling them for almost 6 months now. We do try and stay ahead of the game, I guess that may be why our customers like us so much.
If there is anything more I can do please do not hesitate to ask.
—
Best regards,
Jeff Greene
Upgrade Evangelist
Hello,
Did you order any in the end? That part is the most compatible I have found for this server. The microserver spec shows it needs dual rank UDIMMS and these are dual rank, not the quad rank registered RDIMM memory floating around so looks like it should work. I’m looking to order some so watch this space!
Sweet, go for it.
UPDATE:
I have just ordered the RAM. It’s from a different supplier (Not RAMCity as they don’t ship outside of Australia).
The link is below:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/1333D3X9M032/
Note: It is the exact same RAM from the exact same supplier as the above RAMCity link but they ship internationally outside the US.
I’ll update this blog once it arrives and I have tested it! So far from my searches on-line I can’t see anyone else who has tried this so I really hope it works
UPDATE 23/10/2013. The RAM has arrived! I’ll send another update once I’ve tested it! I’m unable to locate any posts of anyone having tried 2X16GB so if this works, I’ll be the first one to confirm :)
UPDATE 23/10/2013:
Looks like it doesn’t work! Gets stuck on error 0114 during memory initialization! 16GB max is all that’s supported. But since the chipset supports 32GB max, possibly it’s limited in the BIOS?
Though the chipset is able to handle a capacity of 32gb ram (udimm / unbuffered ECC), e3-1200 line cpus are not able to handle udimms with more than 8gb per channel. All mainboards that handle 32gb ram do have 4 channels…
The microserver gen8 mainboard only has 2 channels, which support a total of 16gb ram.
No bios update or 16gb udim will be able to fix that limitation.
It is the same info as I have been able to gather. I just wrongly mentioned it was a chipset limitation.
I’ve never ever had a confirmation from people who claimed they used 32gb.
Correct. Lets hope the gen 9 finally allows more RAM from the release date, otherwise its not worth it. In the meantime you can just do what i did and get a HP DL160 G6. Dual 5000 series quad core xeon cpus with HT and supports 96gb of ram, low power consumption (low voltage cpus). Can’t go wrong. You’ll need a rack since its rack mount. ..or just floor space for it to sit on. But they cost the same as a Gen8 Microserver off ebay. …so pretty good deal.
hi ben,
thank you for buying this server and reviewing it for us on the web.
would you happen to know the actual power draw of the Microserver at idle and under full load? I know the PSU is rated at 150w so I expect it somewhat lower than this?
Hi, pinoy. You’re welcome. I looked in iLO4 to see if there was any power usage reporting but nothing there, if someone gets me the kill-o-watt I’d be happy to check. http://amzn.com/w/20S9YXQKEXZTK although I’m sure someone has one and could post the answer…
Ben
Hi Ben,
just joined the Microserver G8 owners club. Before I used a HP X310 and I was able to control the fan speeds with speedfan – no luck with the G8 so far. I tried some of the power settings (through ILO), no influence on the fan speed. It is shown at 39% speed I consider it still too noisy. As you are looking at noise levels, too – any specialties you have configured to mute the server?
Stefan
Hi, Stefan. Congratulations! I noticed the Microserver’s fan was a little noisy as well (compared to a server I built in a NZXT case). I wouldn’t try to throttle the fan down because the CPU is passively cooled so the motherboard needs to set the fan where it thinks it should be. The fan is large enough it shouldn’t be that loud, I don’t know if it’s the fan itself or perhaps the air rushing through the metal grate behind it. I haven’t looked into it as it’s quiet enough for me. Thanks. Ben
Ben, thanks!
I found the issue – I had the 120i controller disabled and set to AHCI. Changed the config and now the server is inaudible. Thought that’s worth sharing.
Stefan
Hi Stefan,
did you set the 120i to RAID or to Legacy?
Thanks
Patrick
Hi, I set it to Raid, in AHCI loud fans, as discussed, did not try legacy at all.
Stefan
So, is the choice for 4TB disks:
1. use AHCI and have a loud fan, or,
2. use 120i controller, possibly? Does it have a JBOD ability?
I am looking for a quiet storage device, with 16 TB zfs raidz2.
Or use another HBA. https://b3n.org/m1015-hba-in-the-hp-gen8-microserver/
Thanks for the tip Stefan. II changed it a few days ago and the fan is running slower, but the last time I took a reading of the fan speed it was 84F so I’m waiting for another hot day. Ben
Thanks for the reply ben.
Did you upgrade your Gen8’s memory with 3rd party memory? If so which brand and part #? I am looking to upgrade to 16GB.
Also have you tried installing 4TB HDDs? I understand that the Gen8 is certified for 3TB only.
I did, I bought two of these from SuperBiiz: http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=W8GE1600KI On the ILO4 integrated management log I get an informational log that says: “POST Information: Processor 1, DIMM 1 could not be authenticated as genuine HP SmartMemory. Enhanced and extended HP SmartMemory features will not be active.” I don’t know what features I’m missing but everything seems to work be fine.
I don’t have 4TB drives to test. With the SmartArray enabled you’ll only see 3TB for sure, but there’s a chance it will recognize the whole 4TB if you disable the SmartArray and just run it in SATA mode (which you would want to do with ZFS anyway) but I don’t know. I’m working on a post on installing the IBM ServerRaid M1015 which does support 4TB drives if flashed into IT (JBOD) mode. Hopefully I’ll have it posted tomorrow or the next day.
HP 120i manual (&320i) says:
Given the increasing need for high performance and rapid capacity expansion, the HP Dynamic Smart Array Controllers offer:
Up to 32TB of total internal storage with 8 x 4TB LFF SATA hard drives
Up to 9.6TB of total internal storage 8x 1.2TB SFF SAS hard drives (B320i with SAS license)
Does hp sell 4TB disks? Maybe that is the limitation? 3TB or 4TB, what’s the real difference?
I want 4TB disks too.
Thanks for the reply ben.
SmartMemory features
– HP SmartMemory uses up to 20% less power than third-party memory while achieving the same performance. At low voltage (1.35 V), HP SmartMemory operates at DDR3-1333 MHz with one and two DIMMs per channel and at DDR3-1066 MHz at three DIMMs per channel. In comparison, third-party memory requires 1.5 V to achieve the same performance.
– HP SmartMemory performance is 25% higher with Unbuffered ECC (UDIMM) memory and capable of supporting 1333 MT/s up to 2 DIMMs per channel at 1.35V. Third-party memory supports 1066 MT/s bandwidth at higher operating voltage (1.5V).
Good info pinoy, thanks for posting that.
Great information about the new Gen8 microserver!
I’m eager to get my hands one for myself. Is it possible to mount a harddrive anywhere else in the microserver? I currently have 5 harddrives in my N36L and would love to be able to transfer the whole raid set to the Gen8. The top ODD bay doesn’t seem to room a disk…
I don’t think you’d get a 3.5″ drive in the ODD bay, possibly the side if you weren’t running a card in the PCI slot… might be time for an external SAS enclosure.
Thank you Ben, this is detailed and very useful information on the MicroServer Gen8.
Anybody else finds this machine to be noisy ? The G1610T model is specified to be able to run at 21dBa yet I am reading 50-55 dBa at idle (once the machine posts and the fan spins down)!
For people running ESXI, have you been able to pass the Intel AHCI SATA controller using VT-d ?
It seems many people find the gen8 too noisy for a home server. HP has a problem, not just with the micro server, but other models of gen8 as well. And of course, the iLO board is built into it. Some issues: a non HP card lacks temp sensors, so fans speed up.
It seems one can buy the gen8 and hope HP updates the firmware to control the noisy fans, or go with something else. Bummer.
I find it to be noisier than it should be but I don’t hear it with the armoire doors closed. I was able to pass the B20i using VT-d… I haven’t tried in AHCI mode yet. One thing to note is that you can’t pass the controller that you’re using for a VMWare datastore… and VMWare requires a datastore so if you only have one controller you won’t be able to pass it using VT-d. Ben
Hi Ben, (and all other contributors),
I have found your blog, as well as the subsequent discussion/answers, extremely useful.
I am looking to purchase one of the G1610T units, with the possibility of upgrading the CPU to an E3-1265L V2, but have some slight reservations wrt possible heat dissipation issues.
Do you know whether the Gen8 Microserver uses the Intel Thermal Monitoring (Technology)/ management, e.g. for ILO, events, etc.? (Do you know if the E3-1265L V2 has a DTS – Digital Thermal Sensor?)
The reason that I ask is the comparison tables on the Intel websites indicate a ‘blank’ or dash for the E3-1265L V2 for this functionality under the “Advanced Technologies” sub-heading. The other processors, e.g. G1610T, G2020T, E3-1230 V2 and E3-1220L V2, etc. all indicate Yes for this functionality. (I couldn’t find any specific reference in the Thermal Specs/Guidelines either.)
Being new to this, I assume that the Microserver could be configured to generate an alarm/event/notification if thermal thresholds were exceeded, or possibly even power down the unit to prevent thermal damage, by using Intel’s Thermal Monitoring (Technology)/ management CPU functionality….. or is my understanding incorrect?
Hi, John. Xeons that have thermal sensors I know they won’t go into turbo mode at certain temperatures and I believe they’ll even downclock or shutdown (there is a thermal shutdown option in the Gen8 Microserver BIOS which is enabled by default, obviously leave that on). From reading this document is seems like the E3-1265L does have the thermal sensor but you may want to get clarification from Intel: http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/design-guides/xeon-e3-1200v2-lga1155-thermal-guide.pdf
Thanks.
Ben
Hi Benjamin,
Any comments on what sort of power consumption we’re looking at for the Gen8? Appreciate if you have the numbers for the original config, but I’d take your Xeon numbers as well if that’s what’s available.
I am considering a home server that can be used for serving internet accessible wordpress sites, one or two small game servers, and possibly use it for home backup and media streaming as well. My primary concern is annual power consumption, though secondarily I’m also considering the hardware costs. Was looking at a Mac Mini due to its energy efficiency, but it’s limited in terms of HDD bays and I’d probably be running Windows Server instead anyway, so paying more for the “Apple tax” was kind of a turn off.
How much juice does your machine take in off, idle, typical load and full load?
Thanks.
Hi, Christian. No idea on power consumption, I don’t have a watt-o-meter and where I live power is cheap enough I’d probably spend more on the watt-meter than I’d save by changes I’d make. One other thing to look at is the Mac Mini doesn’t use ECC memory which can lead to data corruption if bit flips aren’t detected (it does happen). If you are concerned about power you might be able to have the server power off then do a wake-on-lan when you need it, or have it power off at night and set the BIOS to turn it on. I leave mine on 24/7 because it’s always backing up or ZFS is scrubbing the disks. Thanks, Ben
Hi Ben,
Thanks for replying so quickly! =) Ah, unfortunately the electrical tariff where I live IS a major factor. =\
Oooh, thanks for the heads-up regarding the lack of ECC RAM support on the Mac Mini. I hadn’t considered that much although now that you mentioned it, it might be a crucial thing to note since I’d be using it for the family’s backup. Will explore further before I make a decision then.
Thanks!
Hi Ben
Just one quick question how tall is the CPU Heatstink?
If it is at least 15mm tall, with your pictures seems to be a bit taller, you can attach a Cablematic VU81 Cooler desigend for LGA-1156 processors. Since LGA-1155 and LGA-1156 coolers are fully compatible because the same mounting holes spacing and the VU81 is an axial blower fan you don’t need clearence over it only on the sides.
With this I think you can run full core’s and threads of a E-1265 V2 in rellatively warm enviroments (30º C)
Hi, Marcos. I didn’t measure but based on pictures of the Cablematic VU81 it looks like it would easily fit. One trick with any CPU cooler is finding a way to power it since there isn’t an extra power connector for a FAN… you would want to figure out how to regulate the fan speed based on temperature somehow… Thanks. Ben
Hi ben
You can control the fan speed quite easyly with a remote thermal sendor or with a variable reostator. Also yu can buy something like this … http://www.ebay.es/itm/Smart-Fan-Speed-Controller-I-With-Temperature-Sensor-/160494489350
And get the power from one of the PSU Molex.
Thanks Ben.
It looks like Intel’s online (comparison) table specs may not be up to date. I’ll try and follow-up to get further clarification.
Cheers,
John.
John – Please keep us in the loop with your findings. I just received my G1610T (also thanks to HSS Newegg deal) and my E-1265 V2 is due to arrive tomorrow. Kinda wish I had waited a bit to dig into this a bit further… but so far it looks like I might’ve been lucky with my CPU selection (hoping for best feature-set and thermal performance, regardless of cost).
Also, Ben… thoroughly impressed with this valuable post and your diligence with replies. By far the most useful series of answers on the new Microservers to be found *anywhere* online. I completely agree, HP oughta send you a freebie… considering it was your posts that pushed me over the line to a new purchase!
Keep it up.
Cheers,
-s
PS – Now let’s find the best / most reliable 32GB RAM solution….! Are we in agreement that RamCity is the only contender right now?
That’s the only option I’ve heard of… Don’t know if it will work… But at that price you could almost get a second Microserver!
Thanks for the comment Skelzer, the cpu you’re getting is probably the best option considering tdp and speed. Good, fast, or cheap. Pick any two. Ben
Thanks Ben. Agree, the 45w max TDP of the E3-1265LV2 is very attractive… however, what’s throwing me off is the fact that you’re running at higher wattage with no noticeable heat issues. So now I’m thinking I could get away with upping to the E3-1275V2 without any issues. Bottom line, if cost weren’t an issue, which of the following would you go with:
E3-1275V2
E3-1270V2
E3-1265LV2
Here’s a permalink to the spec comparison on Intel’s site:
http://ark.intel.com/compare/65726,65727,65728
Thanks again for all of the guidance. It’s hard riding the bleeding edge! ;)
-s
You’re welcome. If money were not a consideration I’d get the E3-1265L v2. You will have no worry about heat and I think for most applications 16 or even 32 gb memory will be the main bottleneck before you come close to maxing out the cpu. There’s no reason at all to get the 1275.. Especially when it puts out more heat. The only thing it has that the 1270 doesn’t is hd graphics which the Microserver probably won’t use. Thanks, Ben
Does anyone know how to team the NICs yet? Running server 2012 which has its own teaming but im not sure this is the best way and what HP had in mind, is there a utility i download?
I got a HP 1810 switch, do i need to setup two ports as a trunk maybe?
Ben,
Thanks for the reply re: cpus. I was also leaning towards the E3-1265L v2 as the definitive best option for this server… and I imagine many others will too. Another positive spec that stood out is the dramatic jump between the default clock speed of 2.5 ghz and the turbo clock speed of 3.5 ghz… when most other Xeon options only jump about .5 ghz. This should lend well to thermal considerations and other server specific needs. My E3-1265LV2 is in the mail… this time Intel should be thanking you for my purchase! Cheers.
PS. If anyone is looking for a Blu-ray option for this server, here’s the best option available:
Panasonic/Matshita UJ-262 9.5mm SATA Blu Ray Burner Drive
Note, this is the most recent revision of this drive… be careful to avoid the older model. I picked mine up on ebay for about $170. Shipped from China, as it isn’t available in the US yet.
Really useful blog, thanks for sharing info about CPU upgrade on microserver. I wonder – will latest Citrix XenServer install on CPU upgraded system? Could anybody do such test, please? :) Citrix XenServer is free to download and use.
Thank you very much.
Hi, Andrew. I haven’t tried Xenserver on it, if I had an extra Microserver I’d give it a try. Maybe someone else can post here.. Citrix would be a good alternative to VMware to look into especially now that Citrix has completely open sourced XenServer and all the enterprise features (like failover and such).
Thanks,
Ben
Well maybe another Microserver is not necessary, if someone could try to install latest XenServer on USB key that would prove this is possible without destroying current installation on hard drive… Simply change boot drive, that’s it. Thank you.
Hi, Andrew. It’s not that, it’s that I’ve got services (Email, my blog, minecraft server, etc.) running on the Microserver now that I don’t want to take offline to test it out. I tried Xen a few years ago and wasn’t happy with it so went with VMware, but things may have changed now that a few years have gone by and now. At the time I tested Xen you couldn’t balloon memory (at least not on the free version) but that may not be the case anymore. Hopefully someone else will try and report back.
Ben
Hi, with the stock Celeron g1610T CPU, and the bios released 8/14, I’m seeing 33watts with no drives, and about 60watts with 4 500GB 7200RPM SATA drives. Hopefully it will get a little better with newer drives.
Wonder the 60W is rating at idle state or working state ?
Those are idle, measured with a Kill-a-Watt on 120V power, btw.
During POST, I see about 110watts drawn.
Thanks for the info Barry!
Ben
Has anyone tried putting 32gb memory into this thing yet?
That is a selling point for me if possible.
I found some more 2x16gb ram that I think might work? ..also much much cheaper and its crucial, which i believe to be decent memory brand.
http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?imodule=CT2K16G3ERSLD41339
I am going to try these out soon, but…being broke, its nice to let someone else foot the bill who can afford trying it first ;^)
I wait on edge of my seat for reply!
Actually…that is the crucial link….the same thing is cheaper here..
http://www.allhdd.com/index.php?target=products&mode=search&subcats=Y&type=extended&avail=Y&pshort=Y&pfull=Y&pname=Y&pkeywords=Y&cid=0&q=CT2KIT204872BQ1339&src=ggl&gclid=CLK_zuKfg7kCFUQ6QgodAmcAjQ
Hi, Jared. That’s registered memory so I don’t think it will work. You want unregistered.
Thanks.
Ben
Ahh ok, Good to know Thanks Ben.
I searched all over but it looks like ramcity is the only (2x16gb) 32gb kit out there that I can find that would come close to being what a G8 could use…IF it could use it?
I really wish the G8 could handle what I do with the applications and activities i run on esxi 5.1 with only 16gb and I personally would use it for this as well as my SMB operations if it could handle 32gb.
Its interesting in that not only does average SMB look to be heading that way, but the era of 32gb home servers is slowly becoming a reality, and sooner or later I think the microserver bandwagon is going to hop on it. maybe next year =)
That being said I am keeping other “BYOS” options out there, and so far the only other mini ITX system I have seen that can handle 64gb of ram across 2 DIMM is Gigabytes GA-F2A85XN-WIFI motherboard. Sadly its not a server or enterprise board, and enterprise server arch is best for what I do. Right now I have yet to find a server board mini ITX that handles 32gb and up.
That G8 sure is tempting though, ..If only a little bigger budget….I would have a stack of G8s =)
Thank you for all the excellent material on this microserver.
—
Jared
You’re welcome Jared. I’m looking forward to what the market will bring in the Microserver realm. The 32GB limitation is the Xeon E3 processors, Intel wants you to go to an E5 if you need more than 32GB memory. For SMBs right now you’re better off going larger than mini-ITX. With Supermicro hardware you get free out of band management (KVM over IP) and 32GB memory on the E3 platform and up to 192 or 256GB memory per socket on the E5 platform. And for a SMB if you need support there are plenty of vendors that sell SuperMicro based servers pre-built at a reasonable cost.
Ben
Hi Skelzer,
Apologies for the late reply (-been dealing with personal issues).
I have sent a request to Intel seeking clarification – I will post an update when I receive a response.
The other concern I have with the 1265 processor (which may or may not apply for your application) relates to Ben’s earlier post regarding Supermicro’s C204 suggestion not to use an E3 with onboard graphics (E3-xxx5 series) – I do not know whether this applies to the G8 microserver implementation (- refer http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon/c202_c204/x9scm-f.cfm)
Cheers,
John
John,
Looks like someone got the Xeon E3-1265L to work: http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/5895-potential-cpu-upgrade-options-for-microserver-g8/?p=65644
Thanks,
Ben
Thanks Ben.
Skelzer FYI:
I also received a reply from Intel RE: Xeon E3-1265L V2 – they have verified “that the processor E3-1265L has Intel Thermal Monitoring Technologies and it is also equipped with a Digital Thermal Sensor.” The Intel website information has been reported for correction – so all is looking good.
Thanks again for your assistance.
Cheers,
John.
I have this too, it works well and heat wise there’s barely and difference compared with the Celeron in it, it’s within safe levels
Hi Ben,
Intel C204 chipset does support Intel I/OAT technology. Would you please check if Gen8 server has this option in the BIOS?
http://www.dmtinc.cl/?v=hzXK3.jpg
Hi, Frank. I went through every menu option in the BIOS and didn’t see an option like that.
Thanks.
Ben
Hi, How did you get the HP ESXi running?
I’ve got the HP 5.1.0-Update1-1065491-HP-5.50.26.iso on a USB stick which I’ve recently used sucessfully on other HP Proliant servers.
I boot from the USB stick, and install ESXi to another USB stick.
When I try to boot off the new stick, VMWare begins to load and says at the top of the screen: “Recovery”, and then “Loading”, but nothing ever happens.
I’ve tried both the internal and external USB2 ports.
FreeNAS works fine from USB.
Also, I cannot boot off of the MicroSD card; is that normal?
I hope to use this as a dev server for my Web & WordPress projects.
Thank you!
Hi Barry,
Maybe this will help you. I am using ESXi 5.1 just fine but I had to download the following image – VMware-ESXi-5.1.0-Update1-1065491-HP-5.50.26 as the vanilla iso didn’t have correct drivers. The MicroSD boots up just fine as I installed the hypervisor on it.
Cheers,
Filip
Hmm… that’s the ISO I used. I’ll try another USB key.
Thanks!
I got ESXi working by using another USB thumbdrive.
How does one get ESXi to see the MicroSD card for use as a datastore?
Thanks!
Hi, Barry. VMware will refuse to use a USB device (which is what the MicroSD card reader on the motherboard is) as a data store. It’s just not going to happen.
Thanks,
Ben
Hi Ben,
I would like to know 120i controller (HP Dynamic Smart Array RAID) is real hardware raid or not?
Is it recognized by ESXi 5?
I found the onboard raid provided by Intel Z77 is not supported by ESXi and could not install the hypervisor on the “software raid”
If i installed 4 1T harddisk and form as a raid 0 by using 120i contoller, how do ESXi recognize as a 4T datastore?
Thanks
Hi, Kenni. I don’t know if the 120i works in ESXi, I can see the controller but I just put it in SATA mode and use ZFS (RAID-Z) which I believe is superior (as far as data integrity, performance, capacity and cost) to most hardware RAID solutions. It obviously depends on what you’re trying to do, but I would put the controller into SATA mode and run ZFS over using the 120i in just about any scenario… the only thing I have seen close to ZFS’s end-to-end data integrity is buying a storage appliance like NimbleStorage… but ZFS is free and open source and will run on your Microserver. Do a Google search for Napp-It’s all in one ZFS / VMware solution.
Thanks,
Ben
Dear Ben,
Please I need your support on how to configure an HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen 8 with the highest specs possible?
– 16GB or 32 GB RAM DDR3.
– The highest Intel XEON E3 speed possible without heat E3-1265LV2?
– The Maximum HP smart controller card that can be installed?
– The Maximum HDD capacity including SSD drive if possible?
– Is it possible to add an ODD DVD drive as well?
The MicroServer will be used for virtual lab environment using Hyper-V 2012 R2.
With the new Server 2012 R2 we can configure storage tiers that includes both SATA and SSD in order to get the maximum IO possible.
The new OS 2012 R2 is smart enough to move the hot data to the SSD and low data to the slower disk dynamically.
I need 100GB or 200GB as RAID1 for the OS and the other for Data Virtual Machines combined between SATA 6Gbps and SSD.
Your help is really appreciated.
Thank you.
Regards,
Charbel
Hi, Charbel. I don’t think I can be of too much help, but here goes.
– So far I have not heard of anyone who has tried 32GB memory.
– I think the E3-1265L V2 is the best combination considering performance and heat.
– I have no idea on the HP smart controller. I use ZFS which just needs a dumb JBOD controller.
– The controller that comes with the Microserver supports up to 3TB drives (and only the first two drives are . You can get a cheap M1015 HBA which will support 4TB in JBOD mode, or if you’re trying to do hardware RAID I’m sure you can get a controller that supports 4TB drives.
– I have not tried to add an ODD DVD drive but I’m sure it’s possible.
Let me know how your lab works! I actually tested Hyper-V 2012 on the HP Microserver N40L and it had horrible I/O performance, but it may do better on faster hardware.
I run ZFS which also provides SSD caching. I boot VMware off the USB, the SSD is VMware’s datastore where I have a ZFS server that uses two VMDKs on the SSD as the ZIL (ZFS intent log to cache random writes until they can be written to spindles) and L2ARC (Level 2 Adaptive Replacement Cache) which puts the most frequently accessed data onto the SSD. So the ZIL, L2ARC, and 3 2TB spindle drives in RAID-Z make up the zpool array which is shared back to VMware as a data store via NFS. This setup outperforms some mid-level SANs while also providing better data integrity and more space. If the SSD fails all the array configuration and data is stored on the 2TB spindles so it would just be a matter of re-installing OmniOS and re-importing the pool. Obviously having mirrored SSDs would be better, but they’re so expensive!
Thanks,
Ben
Hi, the onboard 120i controller is not full hardware raid and needs a non-opensource driver if you’re running in RAID mode. If you use the HP ESXi installer, the driver is included; otherwise the ‘generic’ ESXi installer from VMWare does not include the driver and the RAID will not work.
If you just use the 120i controller as an AHCI SATA controller, you don’t need special drivers.
Hi Barry,
I have the HP ESXI Installer. When I install using the installer ESXi sees the logical RAID fine (2×3 TB HDs) but when it reboots after installation none of the drives work. The USB that I install on doesn’t work either. This is the same for a non RAID HD.
The drives don’t work? Did you use the HP Intelligent Provisioning? Do they appear under Storage Adapters? Did you try to create a datastore under Storage? Is there an error message when you try? Have you tried formatting the array to GPT using PartedUtil via the CLI using SSH?
Hi Ben, I can confirm that E3-1220L V2 works great in Microserver. My setup is:
Intel Xeon E3-1220L V2
2x8GB Kingston KVR16E11/8
HP Smart Array P410 512MB/BBWC
4x 2TB WD20EARX
VMWare ESXi 5.1U1 (HP bundle) installed on internal SD Card
https://patriksimek.cz/public/xeon.png
Best, Patrik.
Thanks for the info Patrik! And you know you won’t have to worry about any overheating issues! Ben
Hi Patrick – did you have to buy the HP SD card? I’ve inserted a standard 8GB microSD card but intelligent provisioning doesn’t like it
Just got mine in and was dismayed to find the optical drive is 9.5mm. What makes the UJ-262 the best option over say the much cheaper Uj-162?
Hi Ben,
Thanks for the informative blog post :). Now very tempted to get a Gen8 Microserver, I’ve got one of the old N36L ones sitting in the cupboard, but it’s not quite got enough oomph for EXSi stuff that I’m doing.
Any chance you measured or could check the hole spacing on the heatsink mounting holes? Standard 1155/1156 is 75mm between the holes in a square, if this is the same then it means any aftermarket heatsink should work :).
Thankyou!
You’ll find that info here http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/6170-active-cpu-cooling-for-the-gen8/
Unfortunately, the heatsink isn’t standard 1155/1156 heatsink format but a server form called slim ILM, it’s available on aftermarket, too. But their fans are typically far more noisy than consumer heatsinks
Hi Ben,
Is built-in HP Smart Array support ESXi that you installed on Microserver G8 ?
Thanks
Keith
Just installed E3 1230v2 in my Gen8.
Why do you people disable Turbo instead of disabling a core or two. Turbo also Means it doesn’t clock down when not in use.
In any case, I’ve left turbo on but disabled two cores. Works great :)
I’m running Hyper-V on Server 2012. I’m much more fan of Hyper-V over Esxi, but to each his own.
I came from N40L and one strange thing in Gen8 is the apparant lack of extra power/molex plugs. Found a single molex under the ODD day, which I could split out to add some extra devices.
I had 2x 8gb non-ecc ram I used in the N40L and wanted to use in my Gen8. It didn’t Work. Neither did my 2x8gb non-ecc ram from my PC (high end), so I’m at 2×4 ecc at the moment. Bummer.
For people asking for heat sink measurements. I didn’t measure, but the holes are not placed in a Square as normal.
My Xeon is at 40c though.
Ilo 2 and 3 licenses Work with ilo4 as well btw.
Hi, Morten. I didn’t know disabling Turbo meant it wouldn’t clock down, do you have a reference?
Thanks,
Ben
Hi Ben
Your information is useful, thanks for your hardworking :)
I’ve got a microserver gen8 with E3-1230v3 installed, but i found
that the heatsink is a little bit too hot to touch by bare hands when all 4 cores enabled
so I disabled 1 of 4.
I use it as my home network infrastructure via ESXi Server.
Here’s my VM layout, eth2 and eth3 part are under planning.
http://images.plurk.com/ojcr-3VTZVVEquGlP1fFnUekKRq.jpg
ClearOS as firewall, NAT and DHCP server.
Windows7 serves as media streaming, BitTorrent and VPN server.
I use this configuration with 10G memory installed, 3 HDD drives(2TB, 320GB and 808GB)
with SmartArray disabled (and yes, the fan is quite noisy :p)
Here’s something people may feel interested.
1.
I’ve tested 2/4 and 3/4 cores enabled, but the temperature seems to be same, both 40C(107F) in iLO, I suspect the accuracy…..
2.
The big 14cm fan uses a properitery connector so it’s not possible to change speed with an off-the-shelf fan controller unless you change fan or figure out the pin definition.
3.
It DOES NOT support Non-ECC Memory, I mistakenly bought a non-ECC 8G and it won’t boot.
4.
It has a floppy 4pin connector as the power source of slim ODD drive which is somehow weird, why not slim-line sata?
5.
The heatsink uses slim ILM instead of normal 1156/1155 format, so consumer aftermarket stuff like Corsair or Coolermaster are not available.
Lenzak
my mistake, E3-1230v2 instead v3, a careless typo :/
Thanks for the useful info!
Turbo also disabled the dynamic performance. I actually think it says so in the describtion in the bios too.
Ended up enabling all 4 cores though and disabled Hypterthreading instead. Gave better performance.
I can confirm the thing about UDIMM ECC as required. I have tested using 2 different kits of non-ecc and it would boot on neither. Both kits working on n40L. I havn’t found any post anywhere using Google, where anyone actually managed to use 32gb.
Means it will be almost impossible to use 32gb as UDIMM is the “discount” ECC version and really aren’t available in 2x16gb kits. I had to pay up 170UK Pounds for 2x8gb
Interesting, so if you’re going to disable hyper-threading there’s no real reason to get a 1230, you’d be just as well off with the 1220.
Hi Ben!
I got my server at last, installed CPU, memory, everything is running fine, thanks for all the help!
My problem is that I have 2 pcs of 3TB NL-SAS HDDs, but if I put them in the rack and push them in, they are not recognized at all by the raid card. After a little more investigation it seems 100% sure that they don’ t even power up, I rip them out and don’ t hear any spin-stop or anything, also when in their place, I don’ t feel anything spinning.
My questions:
1. Am I able to use NL-SAS HDDs in this server at all? The connectors seem to fit.
2. How can it be that the HDDs don’t power up? I see that extra cards can help me with SAS connection (https://b3n.org/m1015-hba-in-the-hp-gen8-microserver/), but spinup should be working for the HDDs, right?
Thanks,
Daniel
Of course using a normal SATA drive works, I can hear and feel the spinup and powered on state.
Hi,
re heat sinks, see http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/6170-active-cpu-cooling-for-the-gen8/
re power connectors: the power connector for the optical drive can be converted to a SATA power connector with a cable, e.g. “Dell MX714”, ~$10USD on eBay.
You can also take some power from the standard molex which are located under the metal where ODD is located. :)
Yea, I guess so. There is only 200Mhz standard difference -> 3.3 vs 3.1.Having the 1230 leaves you with future HyperThreading ability if you need it though :)
In Denmark where I live the price is really not that much higher for the 1230 though and I tend to believe the 1220 are just lower quality 1230 so they have HT disabled (just my personal opinion mind)
Try disconnecting the data cable from the motherboard.
HI
Do you think the i7-3770T will match this system?
I think it should….
Ben, I do E3-1240 (sandy, 80w tdp) with 2core/HT enable/Turbo disable.
http://2cpu.co.kr/bbs/board.php?bo_table=unbox&wr_id=1349
Wattermeter shows G2020T and E3-1240 has same watt.
Interesting, do you think that’s because of the PSU not adjusting?
$550 is a rather hefty Price though!
Hi Ben,
Any issues with the E3-1230 V2 since installation? Can we sign it off as safe?
No issues yet, even through summer (I don’t have A/C but the summers aren’t that harsh, maybe 90 deg F is the most it gets).
Have you considered enabling turbo mode again?
Also what program are you using to monitor CPU Temperature and resource usage?
I run VMware ESXi 5.1 (HP’s version) on the Microserver and it monitors all that stuff (I think there are 9 temperature sensors and a fan speed monitor), also you can monitor it from the iLO management interface.
I think it’s safe.
My server is located in a tiny room along with my synology ds 1513+. Server has 4 discs and nas has 6 discs. Room just big enough for the two units, but 2m high.
I have disabled HyperThreading, but running Hyper-V with 4 guests, 2 of them on 24/7, and it never gets close to hot.
Have you considered enabling turbo mode again?
If you asked me about turbo mode, I allready had that on. I just enabled HyperThreading as well now, so all 4 cores, turbo mode and hyperthreading is enabled now. Will see how it goes. Thermal sensor says about 40ish celcius with 4 cores and turbo mode.
Running Server 2012 Hyper-V with 4 guests (2 DCs and 2 Exchange), så CPU usage is periodic.
Intel® Turbo Boost Technology—On-Demand Processor Performance
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/turbo-boost/turbo-boost-technology.html
I’ve found that there is no problem with having turbo mode & HT enabled, at least for me with my e3-1265Lv2. The temps are pretty good, this server is more heat efficient than the old gens because the case is metal, not plastic, allowing heat to escape more easily. It feels like a proper HP Proliant instead of a plastic Dell! The stock heatsink is quite good with the hotter CPU’s, plus these newer gen CPUs are quite energy efficient and therefore also produce less heat than the previous gen
Aww, that’s bad news. Had high hopes for 2x 16gb rams. Only good thing is that my 2x 8gb isn’t wasted then :)
Maybe there is a fix, seeing as some person with a brand new server had same issue (I take it he used the ram that came with his server) http://serverfault.com/questions/510011/hp-proliant-ml310e-gen8-early-system-initialization-hangs-on-90
Another person:
This happened to me on a bl460c G7 and all i had to do to correct it is shutdown the server, re-seed the DIMM chips and it booted fine without error.
Another Again:
Solved it by looking into the processor socket, mine was realy messed up. Had a diagonal line from left to right with bend pins
I’ve already researched it, but those servers that had a similar issue use different components and are more high end. These 16GB modules are currently the only ones available and they meet all the requirements of the gen8, except the capacity is larger. I’ve just updated the BIOS on my server to the latest version and that didn’t help, but I think this can be resolved through a BIOS update. HP has a list of approved memory, even memory that meets all the criteria can fail if it’s not on that list, therefore I suspect someone with good knowledge of BIOS modding can probably fix that.
Maybe when Kingston or Crucial make 32GB RAM it might work. The only reason it’s not on HP’s approved list is because 1x16GB ECC UDIMM RAM is not popular. Only when the big manufacturers start producing it will HP add them to their HP Smart Memory list. Maybe down the road they may do a firmware update, who knows. This is still a new server, time will tell when 16GB modules get cheaper and more people try it.
Can you also added an I7 Core processor.
Svenvg93, Only CPUs with ECC support will work; that rules out most of the i7’s.
I thought the i3s and i7s supported ECC? The know the i5s do not.
The common i3/i5/i7 parts don’t support ECC.
I don’t see any Ivy Bridge i7’s with ECC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Bridge_%28microarchitecture%29#Desktop_processors (click through to the Intel ref pages)
example: http://ark.intel.com/products/65719
http://ark.intel.com/products/65525
Some (most?) of the Pentium and Celeron and i3 parts do seem to have ECC support.
The i3’s still have no VT-D, whereas some i7’s do (without ECC).
I’m not sure why Intel does it this way, except to reduce competing with the Xeons.
Hey Ben. They don’t. Try looking at this for an example: http://ark.intel.com/products/65523 under Memory Specifications: ECC Memory supported: no
Same goes for the new haswell: http://ark.intel.com/products/75122/
Same with and without the trailing ‘k’.
Thanks, kind of odd that that i3s support it while the i7s do not… but good to know.
Hi all, fantastic blog, thanks to Ben and all the other contributors.
I have the Gen8 GT1610), 16gb of HP ram, 4 x 2TB WD Reds (NAS class drives). I think i’ll also upgrade to the E3-1265L V2 (thanks to this thread :) )
HP dropped the ball with only having 2 of the 4 drive controllers to be 6Gbit. So i want to put a 3rd party raid5 card in there to give me near 6TB of mas speed usable storage.
Someone on here has the HP P410 card in, any other recommendations please?
Mine will be booted with Server 2012 Hyper-V, and mainly just run WHS2011 as a hyper-v guest. Room for other testbeds though.
Possibly overkill for my use, but my current NL36 is old hat now.
If i do get a raid 5 card, is there a way of putting say a 256Gb SSD in to run the host OS and use the mechanical drives as raid storage array? Is it worth it? Or should i just use the 4x2TB drives to create 2 raid5 arrays; one for host os, the other for VHDs and storage?
Thanks so much to everyone for this blog, its by far the best i’ve found on the web for the microserver Gen8
Jacko
Hi Jacko!
Take a look here:
https://b3n.org/m1015-hba-in-the-hp-gen8-microserver/
I got a M1015 also (very cheap) and all is working great. I even got SAS disks, they work flawlessly. Nothing extra to do…
But forget about RAID5, this card is not for RAID5, but RAID1 works great, LSI chipset, WebBIOS, MegaCLI, everything works just great from either LInux, Windows or even ESXi, all can run MegaCLI. You can even create a script for RAID-checking, because you will need it sincs iLO will not be able to alert you of RAID problems with extra cards. But MegaCLI is great for this!
Oh yeah, M1015 can be flashed to many modes (google it), allowing passthrough of cards to VMs or accessing HDDs directly from OS without the extra RAID-layer. But these are not needed for normal operation with RAID1.
Bye,
Daniel
Hey Jacko.
I’ve bought a P410 + 512mb flash and battery for use in my Gen8. Performance is really bad unless you get the flash and battery, so remember to add that.
If you want to run Raid5 you have to pay for Advanced features as P410 does not come with that out of the box.
I honestly don’t like Raid5 anyway, and am using Raid10 myself.
You need at least 3 discs for running Raid5, so you can’t run 2 raid5 arrays on 4 discs. You can run 2 raid 1 arrays, but will get better read performance running them all as raid 10.
I’ve seen it a bunch of time that a Raid5 disk breaks after X years and you start to rebuild. But since you added all disks at the same time, odds are that at least one more disk breaks during the rebuild, leaving you with nothing.
Raid 5 is much slower and system intensive when writing as it has to calculate distributed parity (spread out parity instead of 1:1 on raid 10).
That said, I did run Raid5 successfully on my NAS for 5 years. I just don’t like to gamble anymore :)
My system is:
2x 2½” SAS 146GB drives (I bought them cheaply) which fits nicely instead of the ODD bay. Runs in Raid1 for my OS, which is Hyper-V 2012R2. I am planning to add 2 more SAS drives and Mount them on the side of the PSU, making a small bracket.
I have 4x 1TB WD RE (not red) drives in Raid10 which I use for an DC 2012R2 and an Exchange 2013 running on an 2012R2 :)
Is this side bracket sold anywhere? or are there any instructions/drawings of it? Is there room for both disks on the same side? And I guess that a seperate controller card is necessary to add these two disks, if a disk is installed in the ODD and the four diskspaces are used in the main part?
I’m just curiuos, do you have two disks in the ODD bay, and how did you hook it up? And how about installation of 2012 R2 on the ODD disks, did you install through provisioning or just directly? How about drivers?
Br
Frank
As Daniel said, the M1015 Works fine.
I had that one before going to the P410. I changed because I could add Flash and battery to the P410 which isn’t possible on M1015.
P410 can also be managed by bios and HP software on the Gen8.
When adding flash and battery you get much better performance on the P410, but it also comes at a Price Premium compared. At least here in Denmark!
Hi fellas, thanks for the replies. My previous NL36 has an Intel RS2WC040 raid5 card in it.
Do you think this will suffice? If so, i’ll rip it out and put it in the Gen8.
I did entertain Raid10, but it requires 4 disks and would effectively halve my storage, only giving me 4TB.
If i DO go for raid10, i’d prefer a card in there that will give full 6gbit to each controller. rather than the dumb way HP went by only having 2x 6gbit controllers and the other 2 being 3gbit. Just doesn’t make sense to me.
I guess i could use a 256Gb ssd in place of the ODD and could run the 2012R2 Hyper-V from that. I don’t the OS not being raided, i’ll take an auto backup of it regularly so if it dies, i should be able to re-image a new drive without issue.
Morten, you really think there is enough room to fit any more drives in your Gen8?
Thanks again :)
Hi again,
Daniel, i just checked out your link (after my last post). That may well do what i want if i decide to go raid 10.
I’m a little less knowledgeable than some of your guys when it comes to raid and vm, so some of my questions may seem a little…err….out there, lol?
Here goes;
is it possible to put a M1015 in the gen8 to server all 4x 2TB drives at full 6bit speeds in raid10.
Then install 1 or 2 SSD’s onto the inbuilt B20i, again to give the full 6gbit? If i used the ODD conector then i’d only get 3gbit surely?
Any of that make sense? :)
Hi Jacko!
Using the inbuilt B20i for extra 2 HDDs is OK, but you must know that M1015 can handle 8 drives, it has 2 miniSAS brackets, so all you need to solve is where to put the extra HDDs. The cable can be hacked outside of the house.
Or you can get a more expensive RAID card that has externel miniSAS connector.
Yeah, 3 gbit/sec is the max you will get anyway :-) And the ODD will give you only that, yup.
Daniel
Jacko,
About room to fit more drives: yes, I have 2x 2½ SAS drives + battery instead of the optical drive. I just squeezed some of the upright metal thingies meant to hold the ODD.
I found a post somewhere on the net with someone who made a bracket to Mount 2x 2½” drives on the side of the PSU. I did the measures myself, and it will work. Even for the thicker SAS drives I have lying around.
Already found and old ATX PSU and my dremel to make the bracket :)
Regarding the 6gb and 3gb. I don’t really think its going to be an issue for you.
Normal 3½ drives (including RED) can’t saturate a 3Gb sata.
About Space and raid etc. How much Space are you going to use? Unless you are going to use it as storage it doesn’t really matter how you spend 2 of the 4 discs.
Hi Morten,
the Reds will be used at storage. I’m using WHS2011 in hyper-v and want to load on most of my dvd/bd and music library, so in raid10 i’ll get 4tb instead of nigh on 6tb in raid5. Quite a difference when bd rips average out around 10-15gb.
When you guys talk about raid cards allow you to pass through the raid controller to VM, what exactly do you mean by that?
Cheers
Jacko
Oh….don’t suppose there is a caddy that will allow a 2.5″ or SSD to be installed into one of main drive bays is there?
The issue with most adapters is they don’t keep the SATA connectors in the correct location for the hot swap bays. These will work though:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0027JQ0SI/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Or this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994064
Also you probably know that you can use the extra SATA port with the floppy molex to power up an SSD with the appropriate floppy->sata power adapter. You can google on this topic, because this might be what you are looking for.
You need this:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-OEM-Dell-MX714-Floppy-FDD-to-Sata-Power-Converter-Cable-/400298253923?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5d33a29e63
Daniel
Just tried 2×16 GB Ram modules and got stuck at 90% with Status Code 0114.
Also tried with just module.
Kingston
Equiv: HP/Compaq
KTH-PL313LV/16GB
P/N: 627812-B21
SS013A0 9965516-031.A00LF
That’s an RDIMM, you need UDIMM’s. Currently there are no 16GB UDIMM modules from the big vendors. The only vendor that has them is the one I used called MacSales, but those modules are for Intel Xeon MACs, and didn’t work. Until Kingston releases 16GB UDIMM Dual or Single Rank (Not Quad rank), there is no possibility in getting 32GB of RAM. Probably be released next year.
I made a deal with a big supplier, so I can just return them for full refund.
I have seen the ones from MacSales but not really available here in Denmark.
I’m running a e3-1230v2 in my microserver now and it all seems to be going well! I have an Akasa K25 cpu fan bolted on and wired to share the PWM speed control of the rear chassis fan..
Interestingly, the iLO reports a CPU temp of 40celcius. It never ever fluctuates.
I have lm-sensors on linux watching the temperature of the 4 cores, running Prime95 and it is reporting around 65 degrees and yet the ilo is only reporting 40, exactly the same as it reported when I first powered the box up.
I’m not too worried about a sensor reporting a low value, but the box is relucant to increase the fan speed (which is always 29-31% according to the iLO)
Can I ask what your iLO reports for the sensor “02-CPU” and if you see the fan speed increase under heavy load?
Chrisp, thats a coincidence. My fan just arrived but havn’t installed it yet. Also an Akasa K25.
I’m using an e1230v2 as well and 02-CPU is always at 40c and never fluctuates eithers.
I understand the HP Bios has some problems with these Xeons (and others) and they even say they released a new Bios to fix it, but it’s not available at their site.
HP Document ID: c03898077
Virtual-APIC Page Accesses With 32-Bit PAE Paging May Cause a System Crash
Min has actually begun making virtual mem errors, so looking forward to the new bios:
11/11/2013 – Updated to include HP ProLiant ML310e Gen8 v2 and HP ProLiant DL320e Gen8 v2 System ROMs that fix this issue.
The following operating environment is required to expose the server to this issue and HP strongly recommends immediate application of the System ROM update described in the Resolution section below :
•Server operating in a virtualized environment
•Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) enabled
•Intel VT FlexPriority Enabled (this functionality is enabled or disabled by the Hypervisor)
•Intel Hyperthreading Enabled
•Extended Page Tables Enabled (this functionality is enabled or disabled by the Hypervisor)
•Guest operating system using 32-bit PAE Paging Mode
Why are you guys adding a second fan? Not confident the heatsink will suffice?
Two things really.
1) the Xeon chip we’re using has a tdp 35-ish degrees hotter so a larger or more actively cooled heatsink will help.
2) the ilo isn’t correctly reading the cpu temp (bios bug) so it never sees a need to increase the chassis fan speed over 30% (for me) so that’ll make the passive heatsink even less effective
My cpu fan speed is tied to the chassis fan speed so that’s still a bit of a concern
I have a Microserver running the E3-1265Lv2 – been running in an enclosed space for two months now and hasn’t missed a beat. The fan is audible, but not uncomfortably so… (though when I closed the door of the cabinet it is in the fan spun up noticeably.)
The server has 16GB of HP equivalent Kingston RAM – the server recognises it as HP RAM so I recommend it. You’ll save ~40% on cost.
I also have a 120GB Kingston SSD in the ODD bay running as the OS partition with Windows Server 2012 (now R2) – other than having to change the existing 4-pin to a SATA power connector, I have had no problems. Boot time once you’re past the HP POST is very fast and the OS is snappy.
I installed a P222 smart array controller and have 4 x 3TB WD RED drives running in RAID5 for my data storage. I would love to know how much power it is pulling, but don’t have any way to measure it. It’s clearly less than 150W though!
Only issue I have had is with Hyper-V – when creating VMs use SCSI not IDE for the disks. When I left it on the default setting of IDE the performance of the VM was appalling. SCSI made a huge difference. To be fair though, I only have one VM running now – it’s a disposable Windows 8.1 installation I use for downloading.
In a nutshell – the E3-1265Lv2 is a cracking processor, enables all the virtual machine goodies you need, runs cool enough for the stock heatsink and is at a decent enough price point. The only problem I see at the moment is availability! Buy one if you can!
Would be nice to see a Gen8 v2 with Socket 1150 support… Hint hint HP…
Same reasons as Chrisp said. My chassis fan is running almost full tilt most of the time. Seems its tied to raid controller somehow and I’m using an P410 instead of the onboard controller.
(note: seems my fan is Down to 32% right this moment, so now i’m perplexed.) Cpu fan still not really noise compared.
I tied my fan speed to 12v molex. Still less noise than from the 120mm which is running rather fast most of the time regardless of what I do.
The added active fan on CPU will also (hopefully) help cooling some of the hotter areas like LOM and Chipset. Will also blow some on ram, but I don’t think thats an issue.
I read on the homeservershow forums that using a different controller than then onboard b120i will cause high fan speed
Kamaran, even using the b120i in AHCI causes high fan speed, and it’s taking far too long for HP to fix this.
I’m using the b120i with the e3-1230v2 and my unit is v quiet.
Anyway I’ve changed processor to the more expensive :( e3-1265lv2 to play it safe.
What is the “02-CPU” temperature (log into ilo Information -> System Information -> Temperature)?
Mine is stuck at 40%.
I’m concerned that if I were to use the B120i drivers (which I can’t because HP made them closed source.. fucking good job, guys!) Then my ilo would not run the system fan at 30% but more likely 6%
However, because it also can’t read the temperature of the CPU, I would be extremely worried that it never increased the fan speed when the CPU was busy.
If I run 8 copies of Prime95 on my system, the CPU stats report 66degrees… however, the ilo still thinks its 40degrees and the fan speed never increased.
If you’re running a Xeon AND the B120 drivers, I’m concerned the fan might actually be too slow. If it could read the CPU temperature correctly, it might speed it up (say to 15%)
I guess “quiet” is a relative thing. But mine is running at 32 % now.
Still too noisy for me if it was to sit next to me. Since it’s hidden far away, away, I don’t much mind.
I have all 4 cores, turbo and hyperthreading enabled and it’s not getting hot, so I’m ok as well :) Not hot as measured by the rest of temp probes and by touching the heat-sink after a while.
My cpu temp in ilo is also stuck at 40% which is why the Akasa K25 i mounted is drawing full 12v from molex. Can’t really rely on the system fan.
As a side note, I found that disabling VT-d on the cpu makes for a more stable run. At least mine stopped rebooting once in a while running Server 2012 R2 hyper-V.
Just have to wait for the bios update HP has published news about, but not made available, grr.
Hi Morten
Where did you read about an update that would fix the fan speed issue. Do you have a link? I’m experiencing it too in both B120i and AHCI, no difference. Way too loud for me.
Hi Ben,
I just purchased proliant gen8 microserver. With a good cpu and a pcie Video card can i play games on it ? Could you please recommend me a good cpu for games?
Kind regards,
Sil
Silviu – you cannot game, this is a server not a gaming rig..
I also bought this server and a e3-1230v2 cpu, i think tommorow i will assemble the new cpu in the server and test it!
but it should work with a PCIe videocard and a good cpu no ?
Hey Frank. It’s not saying anything about fan noise, so I guess you have to fix that some other way.
The update I referred to was “only” about rebooting when using VT-D for some Xeons
Google “hp knowledge base c03898077”.
I’m absolutely certain it mentioned bios (J08) in revision 1, but the post is now revision 2, without any references, so I guess it might be bios J06…
I’m just running with the onboard B120i and Smart disabled completely as I use an HP P410 controller. I tested if I could make the fan go slower, by enabling the onboard fan, and tried various settings like AHCI etc, but with no difference.
I could not make the fan go slower than the 32ish, and it still sounds like a turbine. I will end up changing the fan or or insert a resistor if it continues.
While testing the above, I noticed they have a newer “HP Intelligent Provisioning (IP)” than the one I used. Google this to view instructions “HP ProLiant Gen8 Server series – How to Reinstall or Upgrade Intelligent Provisioning on HP Gen8 Server”.
Hi Morten
I’m surely not pleased with the server being so loud, since dbA is specified to 21. I see others having this issue too: http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/ProLiant-Servers-Netservers/MicroServer-Gen8-is-noisy/td-p/6171563#.Upte_uIkr80
Think I’ll be creating a ticket in the upcoming week to, as well as the others. I will try to remember to report back here with the result. If you get any new information on this issue, please also do post this.
Br
Frank
DK
I gave HP a call, and funny enough, the first level supporter I talked with, confirmed the issue as he has had others several months ago, reporting the precise same issue. He mentioned that the issue currently is placed at third level support, meaning that the are handling the issue, trying to solve it. So the more people leaving a greeting with HP support, the more pressure will be put upon them. Hope it will be solved soon.
Hi,
How many disk i can put on/or inside the MS GEN8? I would like to build 6 2,5 disk inside, and 2 disk in raid 1 for the os, and the 4 3,5 disk so that Will be 12 disks. Will this work?
Hi,
how many disk i can put inside the GEN8 i planning to put 6 2,5 disk inside… 2 on the top and 2 on each side? is this possible?
Hi, I believe there is enough room if you can find some way to mount the drives, but you’ll also need to find a way to cable them.
hi,
thanks for the reply, do you know what cabels do i need (molex sata?) do i really need a Raid controller?
MrMoi,
It depends what you’re trying to do. The onboard controller can run in AHCI JBOD mode, and supports at least 5 drives.
In RAID mode, it only supports RAID 0, 1, and 10.
(no raid 5 or 6)
The connector for the DVD drive is standard SATA, but the cable going to the 4 hotswap bays is a SAS multi-port cable which splits into 4 hotplug ports.
You could get a cable to break it into standard cables, or you could get drive bay adapters to plug your 2.5″ drives into the hotplug bays.
Thanks!!!
i will run raid 10 for the disks. one quistion, can you post a link wish cable do i need the buy?
MrMoi: Yes you can. You have to make brackets for the sides though.
I have 3x 2½ SAS discs on top + Battery for my P410 controller. The SAS discs are thicker than normal 2½ discs.
MrMoi, regarding cables. Don’t start on this project if you are having issues with the cables already.
The onboard Raid Controller does NOT Work with SAS discs, so don’t try that. For the amount of discs you want to use I’d buy a HP P410 controlller or the cheaper M1015
controller for the 2½ discs and then use the onboard controller for the 4 interal ones.
The cables you are going to need with SATA 2½ discs are:
Two: SFF8087 to 4x SATA
You need to split out the molex found under the Optical bay area. I also took power for some of my discs from the Optical bay power source with a homemade adapter.
I Might be making a section on my site with the modifications I made (would be nice if I could just post Pictures here)
How is the HP server handling 3rd party RAID controller cards? Want RAID 5, and think the P222 is a bit pricy. Didn’t realize that onboard RAID 5 wasn’t supported until I got the server. Thought it was std. on most mashines.
Hi Frank,
I recently got an LSI 9240 card on eBay. I had a problem with the card not saving a new RAID config, but updating the LSI firmware solved that.
However, sometimes the system will not boot up with the LSI installed; it continually reboots after the POST screen.
Unplugging the power seems to help.
The LSI has the same SAS/SATA connector as the HP motherboard, so one can plug the HP cable into the controller and still use the drive bays.
Frank, I’ve used an M1015 (no raid 5) and an HP 410 (no raid 5) which I still use, without any issues.
It’s really nice using the HP 410 as it uses the HP Smart Array / Utility software.
I bought the P410 on ebay from the uk and battery+cable from ebay de.
Raid 5 is not standard on more “enterprise-like” raid controllers, as Raid 5 is really very vulnerable. Consider you buy 4 identical discs.
After 4-5 years the first one fails. You buy a new disc and the system starts rebuilding. It needs to do a full parity/checksum on all the discs to do that, it is rather likely that one more disc fails on you and you loose evertyhing.
This exact thing happened to me on a Synology nas 3 weeks ago. Luckily I had it setup to raid 6. so it was ok to Loose 2 discs.
Raid 5 requires lots of cpu in order to process the parity data needed, either from raidcontroller or from the real cpu, in which case you are dealing with software raid 5.
I’m using raid 10 on mine and now have a 5 bay nas an use raid 6 on that one.
Hi Morten
HP 410 does support RAID 5 as of what I see:
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/arraycontrollers/smartarrayp410/
Since I can’t go for RAID 5 at the moment, I’m forced to go with RAID 1+0. But this will leave me with only half the space. And it ain’t more “secure” than RAID 5, considering that if you loose two disks in the same pair, you’re done. I have four disks, so RAID 6 is not an option, unless disks plugged in using USB can count in and be set up in RAID?
Hey Frank.
Sorry, your right, I was thinking about raid 6 and 60 as I had my eyes on 6 before going with raid 10.
Raid 1+0 or 10 is much more secure than raid 5. Raid 5 is secured using Parity calculations, while Raid 10 is true mirroring. Raid 10 has much better write performance than raid 5 as well, since there is no parity calculations taking place.
Raid 6 you have to Loose 2 “random” discs for it all to break, while raid 10 has to Loose 2 specifc discs for the raid to stop working.
Also much greater success rate of rebuilding raid 10 than raid 5 as raid 5 has to do a full parity check on all discs. Raid 10 does not have to do that, as it functions using true mirroing without parity.
I do understand people wanting to do raid 5. I did it myself for 4-5 years with great success. I’m just glad I had external Space for backup of the NAS when a disc broke and I tried to rebuild, as one more disc failed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
As a final note on storage. I don’t see Gen8 as a good NAS. It’s too expensive and too noisy. I’d rather go with a real Synology og Qnap nas or make a nas from an N40L or even an N36L (or whats its name)
You can run raid 6 with 4 discs if you want to.
Ohh, I see that now. Yes you are correct, RAID 6 can be done with four disks. Thought five was needed. I’m just having a hard time with loosing so much space to RAID 1+0. Bought four 4TB disks, in expectance of only loosing the space of one disk. Now I will be down to half. Bummer. Guess I’ll have to live with it. Or buy a new RAID card. If I choose RAID 1+0 and wish to change to RAID 5 at some point, will all data then be wiped?
i’m in the same situation.. i cannot choose a raid setup.. i have 4x 2tb hdd and i was thinking about raid5 setup.. what should i choose?
Yes, data will be wiped if you change raid types from raid 10 to 5 or the other way.
If you buy a P410 at some point I’d strongly recommend buying the ram+battery as it will perform rather badly untill you do. Will be fine for storage without though.
And here’s HP’s official answer about high fan speed:
“Comment added: 12/4/2013 10:15:14 PM
Product working as designed.
Comment added: 12/4/2013 10:14:57 PM
Problem Description: Microserver Gen8 fan noise
Solution: Use controller in RAID mode
Additional comments: If using AHCI or Legacy controller mode, fan noise will occur. There is no possibility in lowering the fan speeds in this modes to a lower value. It is going to be BIOS/iLO safe ranges.
Comment added: 12/4/2013 2:46:34 PM
A customer advisory will be released in the next weeks.
Product working as designed.
Closing subcase.
Hi,
I would like ask if you can measure distance from mainboard from bottom to max hight of cooler.
I want to swap xeon e3 or probably i5 2500k and this cooler http://www.noctua.at/main.php?show=productview&products_id=50&lng=en
or maybe any kind of water cooler ?
Thank anyway
Hi all,
I want to put 4 SSD the server, 1 for the os on the ODD en the 3 others for vms and datastore and 1 HDD for a daily back-up of the server.
The question is what SSD/HDD do i must use? I was looking for:
1x 60gb Kingston v300 for the os
3x 120gb SSD for the data store and vms, do i go for Samsung, crucial or kingston’? Don’t want to pay much.
1x 1tb wd. green/red or seagete,
Thanks for the info
That’s just sad Frank. I’ve noticed my fan goes between 32 % and up to 50 %. The high points are during startup but its still very noisy at 32 %.
Guess I’ll simply have to put in a better quality fan.
Hugo, the i5’s do not have ECC RAM support and therefore will not work in these servers (someone’s already tried).
MrMoi,
If you’re going to be doing a lot of writes to the SSDs, you should get ones with a high write lifetime, e.g. the Samsung 840PRO.
BJ,
What do you think of the Samsung evo ?
Hi,
Video card Gigabyte GeForce GT 630 2GB DDR3 128bit PCIe 2.0 it is compatible with the PCIe slot from microserver gen8 ?
Kind regards,
Sil
Hi,
Could you please tell me where can i find the motherboard Manufacturer Number ? i cannot find it .
Kind Regards,
Sil
With your gen8, did you use the HP custom ESXi disks? Did it allow the stock RAID card to be used with VMware, or did you have to go with a 3rd party controller
Well, I’ve went with RAID 10 now that I can’t choose RAID 5. I’m booting from the internal USB port, running ESXi5.5. When I boot the server, the array I’ve created is seen (or the logical drive is), but when ESXi is booted up and ready, and I use vSphere to try to create a datastore, all disks are seen, not the logical drive. Along with that, the fan keeps running at 48%. Don’t understand it. What am I doing wrong, or what am I missing? If I enter Intelligent Provisioning or RAID setup during bootup, the fan goes down to 6% fan speed.
Frank, you need to use the HP version of the esxi installer. it is on vm ware’s site and is also linked from hp’s site.
Maybe you need to configure raid when in Esxi / vSphere? Just an idea, as I use Hyper-V.
You can run Hyper-V for free as well now.
Did you configure ESXi using Intelligent Provisioning or how is that done with ESXi?
I don’t understand why RAID should be configured in ESXi, when it’s configured in HW RAID? I’m kind of forced to run HW RAID due to the fan speed problem. I booted ESXi from internal USB port as first run, and run ESXi installer, installing directly on the same USB key. So, no. Didn’t use Provisioning OS installation procedure.
Oh. Well, I started installing ESXi, and afterwards set up RAID, so don’t think so. But maybe ESXi is messing with the RAID in some way. I don’t have the experience with ESXi either to know if it could be ESXi tricking me.
my SSD is not listing, do i must 2 check something in the bios?
I just wondered if ESXi install broke the HW setup of raid so you had to do it Again. Just an idea, as I really don’t know.
Don’t know why my reply ended up at my last post???
Oh. Well, I started installing ESXi, and afterwards set up RAID, so don’t think so. But maybe ESXi is messing with the RAID in some way. I don’t have the experience with ESXi either to know if it could be ESXi tricking me.
No, ESXi does not interfere and it cannot do so. And no, you can’t configure RAID in vSphere. You have to use the Intelligent Provisioning. You also need to use the HP Customized ISO of ESXi, not the VMWare standard one as the HP one provides the correct drivers for Gen8 Servers. Furthermore, I would not recommend using the B120i with ESXi as unless you are using the P222 or P420i with FWBC, it will perform poorly in anything than RAID 0/1 without the FWBC anyway.
Where do I locate HP version of ESXi? In what way will I feel perfomance drop using RAID 10. I don’t have a RAID card other than the B120i, so for now I’m stuck. Not using HW RAID will result in fan speed at 48%.
The HP website………..
Oh my, why didn’t I think of that, doh :O) I’ll take a look at that as soon as possible and return with the result.
For those of you out there who wish to install ESXi on your HP Microserver, here’s the link: http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/software/vmware/esxi-image.html
Thanks to Harpinder for stating the obious :O) I will be playing with this version in the evening. I’ll report back how it goes.
Harpinder, what is the difference between the P222 and the P410i?
The difference will be in performance and RAID options. Again, you can compare different RAID Controllers via the HP website.
Parminder, I’ve now compaired the two models, and it seems that they support the same RAID levels. The 420 seems to have more FBWC available than P222. Found the compairison chart here: http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01608507.pdf
What would you recommend? Have no idea performance wise, which one I should go for. There’s a small price difference between the P222 with 512MB FBWC and the 420 with 1GB FBWC. I don’t have great perfomance needs. I’m going to use the server for NAS, and running different virtual mashines when needed with different OS’s for reference needs. For now I’m planning on running a virtual mashine with Plex (not sure of OS yet, but maybe a Linux distribution. Also I’m planning on maybe running NAS4FREE. Also at some point, I’m planning on running a webserver (no more thoughts in to that yet). So performance wise, I don’t think I need anything big. But please do share thoughts and concerns that I maybe don’t see. I’m new to this world, so any ideas are welcome. Also want to use this server to train my self in server management. I’ve installed 16GB RAM and I choosed the Celeron processor, with changing to the Xeon processor if needed at a later time.
Hi Frank!
I am not sure you know that you have another option for RAID card, which is much-much cheaper and gives you 6 Gbps for all 4 HDDs.
Take a look here:
https://b3n.org/m1015-hba-in-the-hp-gen8-microserver/
You will not be able to do RAID5, but RAID10 should work according to this thread:
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/261249-raid-10-not-available
(and here is how: http://xorl.wordpress.com/2012/08/30/ibm-megaraid-bios-config-utility-raid-10-configuration/)
Using another card has a drawback of not being able to integrate it with HP’s iLO, but you can write custom scripts to look at the health of the HDDs, MegaCLI is available on all platforms and works well.
Bye,
Daniel
p.s.: You can also attach another 4 HDDs later one, but this card does not have an external connector, you will have to hack a miniSAS cable out of the housing to an external HDD-case. There are other options that have external connectors also, but they cost more and you have to search for them, but you will find it if neccessary. I have chosen M1015, if I need more HDDs I will take off the cards profile and hack the cable out of the house :-)
Daniel, thanks for your input, though I still think I’m gonna go with the P222 due to the fanspeed issue. Seams like the only choice if one wants the fan speed at 6%.
The HP ESXi version of course worked. Fan speed is now at 6%. Still noisy in my opinion. Think I’m gonna move the server out of my living room.
> Daniel, thanks for your input, though I still think I’m gonna go with the P222 due to the fanspeed issue. Seams like the only choice if one wants the fan speed at 6%.
I didn’t think the P222 solved the fan issue? I thought only the onboard B120i with suitable drivers let the system run at a normal fan cpu?
Why do you think it would fix it? I’m keen to give it a go, but the card seems a bit of a waste if it doesn’t (since I’m personally only using RAID1)
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/ProLiant-Servers-Netservers/MicroServer-Gen8-is-noisy/m-p/6180865/highlight/true#M20010
I have no proof to the P222 “solving” the fan speed issue. It’s my guess from the controller card being listed in the tech spec from HP. Guessing that the Sea of sensors works with the P222. Can’t prove it, unless others can confirm it working. I’m very close to ordering one, but am waiting a little time, waiting for maybe a confirmation that it actually works. Otherwise I will maybe contact HP support to have it confirmed.
ESXi does not support software raid provided by the Microserver. The only option to use Raid is using a dedicated raid controller. You set this up correctly, it is just a limitation of the Fake raid controller of the Microserver.
Guys, i’ve been thinking about my set up a bit more now.
Just bought the E3-1230-V2 to replace the stock cpu. I have 4 x 2TB WD Reds.
I was thinking, maybe put a 250GB SSD in the optical bay (i know it will run at sata2 speeds max), install Hyper-V 2012 on it and run WHS2011 as a vm guest. Then using the onboard B120i controller to create a raid 10 array with the reds.
It bugs me that only 2 drives will work at 6gbit speeds, but i’m guessing i’ll not really see any performance hits due to that.
The server will be basically to house all the family media and stream stuff to TV’s as and when necessary. I’ll plug an external dvd-writer in when cd/dvd reading is required.
Does this sound plausible for a home setup?
My original idea of putting a P410i in there purely for raid 5 AND full 6gbit across all drives is probably overkill.
Would appreciate anyone input on this please. Thanks :)
Why on earth did HP put a floppy connector where one would expect either a sata or normal 4-in molex to be for an ODD or SSD???
For the life of me i cannot find a female floppy to female molex power adaptor anywhere.
How have you guys installed either a SSD or ODD?
Hey Jacko. You wont notice any speed issue from the 6/3 connectors. 3Gbit is more than enough to populate combined bandwidth from your raid setup.
You don’t really need an SSD, but I understand why SSD is nice.
If you can place the server outside of your living room, it is a fine solution, but it’s way too noisy to place next to your tv.
Raid 10 is much better solution from an endurance and performance perspective but it does require more space than when running Raid 5.
IF you end up buying a P410 Card you should/must buy the extra ram and battery or the performance from that Card will not be better than the onboard one. HP fails to mention this.
Thanks for the input Morten. The server will sit in an understair cupboard so sound and airflow/heat isn’t an issue here.
I was mainly thinking of using the SSD as 1) its quicker, 2) its separate to the storage, so can be backed up separately.
Again, after thinking about it, not sure a P410 with extra ram and battery will be a worth while investment, just for raid5. Raid10 will leave me with 4TB of usable storage, which is enough.
Again, your input would be most appreciated.
Thanks.
It all depends on usage. If its mostly for media storage and file sharing I’d go for a NAS and then stream to some box placed at your TV. A box without fans and HDs. I’m using a Synology nas and a Boxeebox, but the boxee is old by now. – I don’t know which box would be good now.
I wouldn’t put anything with any fan or hd near my living room, but i’m really sensitive to noise, so thats just me.That said, the Gen8 really is noisy and remember that raid on 4 HDs means 4 HDs are spinning when your using it = way more noise than 1 hd. I can hear my Gen8 through a double-drywall – but again, I have rather good hearing :)
In any case, I’d start out with build-in RAID and see if it doesn’t fit the bill. If it doesn’t I could always upgrade at a later point.
Why on earth did HP put a floppy molex where they expect you to install an ODD or SSD????
I cannot find a female floppy to female molex adaptor anywhere, so looks like i’ll have to customise it.
Is it ok to cut off the male floppy connector and replace it with a regular male molex connector? I noticed the cables are slightly thinner that those from a standard ATX psu. Would it matter?
In my post above i meant replace male floppy connector with FEMALE molex not male.
You can use this one http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-OEM-Dell-MX714-Floppy-FDD-to-Sata-Power-Converter-Cable-/400298253923?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5d33a29e63
I have changed the SATA power to a Molex to fit my needs. I just hate to cut the wires from factory.
HI all, i am quite new to the ESXi. And i am now trying to install ESXi 5.5 to my Gen8 HP Microserver. but error “An iLO Advance License is required for continued use after server startup” is prompted. Do I really need to purchase the license? how much is it? Thanks
Don’t recall hitting that info when I installed ESXi 5.5. Do you need ESXi 5.5 by the way. Else go for HP ESXi version 5.0 which include needed drivers for handling fan speed. Otherwise it will run at 40-50% instead of 6% when using built in HW RAID. I’ve installed the HP version instead, and the fan is steady at 6%.
Hi,
I just upgraded the Graphic Card in my Hp Proliant gen8 microserver.
I have added a Sapphire Radeon HD6450 2GB DDR3 64bit Passive LP and it works whitout any problem.
Kind Regards,
Sil
P222 has an internal and an external SAS connector. P422 has two internal SAS connectors.
Maybe take a look at P410 with 512 BBWC + battery instead. Should be cheaper and still more than powerfull enough.
I’m a little confused. Only the P222 is mentioned in the tech spec in this link: http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/14565_na/14565_na.pdf
Are the P422 and P420 combatible with the Gen8 microserver? And can’t seem to find one named P420i? In what way does the battery help?
How well is the microserver handling spikes in power?
I’m using P410. Works really well with the microserver, including Intelligent Provisioning and bios etc.
I’m using a small APC UPS, which I’d strongly recommend to filter out spikes and prevent bad shutdowns etc.
Okay, sounds great. Could you please clarify; Choosing BBWC over FBWC doesn’t mean anything other than the “battery” part is placed seperately instead of on the printboard? Is that correct? Got my facts from this link: http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-BladeSystem-Server-Blades/Flash-Based-Write-Cache-FBWC-amp-Battery-Backed-Write-Cache-BBWC/td-p/1517#.UrHzeeIgnjM
The P410 BBWC version currently cost 3350DKK and the FBWC 2500DKK.
Morten, do you have the Gen8 microserver? Just need to have confirmed that fan speed is not affected by using the P410 (running at 6%).
Yes, I own a Gen8 microserver and use a Xeon 1230-V2. I have mounted an Akasa k25 cpu-fan to make sure it was cool.
Fan right now is 39%. Normally at just above 40 it seems. I don’t know if it would be slower without the P410, but it has always been very noisy to me. I’ve tried every bios combination with no improvement. (not removed the P410 as that is pointless for me)
Is the fan speed controlled by BIOS/iLO? With build in HW RAID fan speed is pretty fixed at 6%. Else, it’s at between 42-48%. Sure not interessed in having the fan going up at over 40% if I use a P410. If that’s the case, I’d better go with the P222 which should support the sensors/iLO readings.
BBWC vs FBWC http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-BladeSystem-Server-Blades/Flash-Based-Write-Cache-FBWC-amp-Battery-Backed-Write-Cache-BBWC/td-p/1517
1. BBWC works as everybody knows. There is DRAM memory module which contents are retained as long as the battery has some juice left.
2. FBWC, on the other hand, works differently. It is an ordinary BBWC module with additional FLASH memory. It also needs a power source to operate properly but with much smaller amount of energy thus enabling capacitors instead of batteries to be used. The crash event in case of FBWC use goes as follows:
– no power on the machine,
– get data from DRAM stored onto FLASH using energy from EXTERNAL capacitor, called by HP “Super Capacitor”.
– wait for next power-up.
HP does say that Super Capacitor comes in exactly the same form as the Battery Module. They have different part numbers though: 587324-001 for capacitor, 462976-001 for battery pack.
See page
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=120&prodSeriesId=…
and
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c02231971/c02231971.pdf
for yourself please.
Two last things:
1. Because both caches use DRAM memory there is no performance difference there.
2. Super Capacitors wear off eventually but HP does not state how to diagnose them but opening the server and checking leds on the memory module.
My fan has never ever been at 6%. Not before I put in the P410, and not after either. I started out with the celeron, later upgraded to Xeon, and then later installed the P410 for better raid performance.
It has always been loud regardless of configuration.
I’m using newest bios/firmware/drivers for everything, so that’s not it.
My P410 shows up fine in bios and every other application, so don’t see how that would be different with any other raid controller?
About prices, you can get P410 with or without bbwc pretty cheap on ebay and such.
If I choose the b120i controller, and create an array in Provisioning, the fan goes down to 6%. It keeps at 6% when I boot and run ESXi image from HP.
Wow. Mine never did that. Same on Server 2012 and 2012R2. Start out high then drops to 40ish and stay there. Always used IP as well (Intell.. Prov..)
Hi fellas (again),
Right i’m using a 500gb SSHD plugged into the ODD sata port as my OS disk (i eventually sorted a molex connecotr out :)). My WD Reds are setup as raid 10 on the B120i. However when i try and install WS2012 Hyper-V R2, it can’t find any device to install to and wants the drivers loading. I have 2 logical arrays, so the 500gb SSHD is recognised and configured by the ACU at least.
1) went the provisioning route and the system just hung for hours when updating firmware on SAS drives. So i had to crash the server down.
2) When i tried again, it hung when trying to update to the latest version of provisioning
3) So, this is why i’m trying the old fashioned way of booting from installation dvd.
Any ideas what to try next please? I wouldn’t know what storage driver to go looking for or where to get it from to be honest.
Thanks for any more help you can offer.
Jacko
Okay, so it’s then confirmed, that the P410 isn’t supported (at least not 100%), as stated in the technical document (where it doesn’t appear). Hmm, crap. My plan is to put the server away in a cupboard (and do some ventilation), but it’s not decided yet. So if it has to sit in the living room, I diffenetly don’t want the fan to be running at over 40%. I can still clearly hear it at 6%, with other equipment running in the proximity (PC which also is noisy). Guess I have to go with the P222 if no other card is compatible with the iLO sensors.
Hey Jacko. I would update the Intelligent Provisiong seperately as described here: http://h20566.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.PAGE/public/psi/mostViewedDisplay?javax.portlet.begCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken&javax.portlet.endCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken&javax.portlet.prp_efb5c0793523e51970c8fa22b053ce01=wsrp-navigationalState%3DdocId%253Demr_na-c03458406-2%257CdocLocale%253Den_US&javax.portlet.tpst=efb5c0793523e51970c8fa22b053ce01&sp4ts.oid=5177957&ac.admitted=1387457527405.876444892.199480143
Thanks, useful to know, although i’ve sorted it now.
I managed to get the storage drivers downloaded onto cd then shoved that in the server and selected the correct ones. But it then said it couldn’t install onto either the raid10 array or the 500gb SSHD. It was then that i check in ACU and realised i’d not set a primary boot drive. Once i’d set the 500gb as that, it installed it fine.
Now i have an issue in hyper-v 2012 whereby i add a local admin, but when trying to add the password as requested, it just won’t let me type ??????????
Oh the fun of server installs.
Re RAID cards: The LSI 9240-8i is about the same price new on eBay as the m1015, but it also supports RAID5.
I got one, and it works, and I was able to flash it into IT mode, but I could not get a VM in ESXi 5.5 to turn on with it mapped via PCI Passthrough (VT-D).
I have a Xeon CPU now, and ESXi allows me to setup the passthrough, but it won’t start a VM.
Okay, maybe a dumb question: The P222 has 4 internal and 4 external SAS ports. Does this mean that I can attach 8 drives?
Hmm, 4 internal and 4 external as stated by EDBPriser: http://www.edbpriser.dk/i-o-hub-og-kort/hp-smart-array-p222-512-with-fbwc-id-6721241.aspx
1 internal and 1 external as stated by HP: http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product.aspx?sku=10389147&pagemode=ca
I’m confused. How many physical disks can I plug in to a P222?
Frank, it has 1 internal SAS connector. Same as onboard plug from your microserver. Standard is to use a cable splitting 1 SAS to 4x sata, so both is correct.
The P222 also has an external SAS (other plug I think) which can connect to an external enclosure to add more drives to it.
I would go for an adapter with 2 internal as I have 4 3½ drives + 3x 2½ drives internally in my server.
Frank, you are welcome to mail me or add me to Messenger. Just use my first name before @dintid.dk to find me.
Also have a some blog posts at itnotes.eu – None specifically directed at the microserver though.
Hi Morten. Yeah, the external is a serial SAS connector. Took some time for me to understand the internal/external principal, but this video showed it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMTnIGM_E5k
I can’t seem to find a P222 card with two internal SAS plugs, so I guess that I’m stuck with four drives, and one for the ODD, where I plan to place a 2,5″. Don’t guess that I can use the external SAS plug to convert to SATA connectors. Think it has to connect to another serial interface.
Can I use the cables already in the server if I buy the P222, or do I need to buy new ones?
Morten, I don’t use Messenger, so it will be by mail. I’m guessing you’re danisg too :O)
Played around with CentOS and Plex last night. Didn’t quite came through, but am continuing later today.
Hi again,
right, had issues with disk issues, so i replaced the 500gb sshd with a 120gb ssd. But now the bios screen says its not the required size hdd in bay 5 (odd)? Really?
Any ideas, a i don’t know why i’m getting kernal errors with the SSHD using the B120i
Hi Guys,
I thought I’d also post my thanks as I have recently bought the Gen8 server (after already owning an N40L, N54L & ML110 G7. I’ve upgraded the server to have the Xeon E3-1230 V2 (nothing toned-down), a 120GB SSD, some additional drives (one of which being 4TB), 16GB memory and an additional HDMI GPU which are all working fine.
I thought I would post some of my findings which may be helpful to others:
Server 2012 R2:
For those wanting to use Server 2012 R2 I found following installation of the OS you MUST immediately install HP C020926 which is an older driver for the RAID controller as the one installed by 2012 R2 causes the machine to blue screen and crash.
The file is available in the HP Service Pack:
http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/products/service_pack/spp/index.aspx
It is also advisable to download and run the HP-SUM to install drivers & HP software:
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/server-software/product-detail.html?oid=5182020#!tab=features
Slimline DVD drive:
Some of the links posted above for the cable adapters required are in actual fact wrong, the slimline drives use a MINI Sata power connection and therefore you will need a cable to suit such as:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0027FFRP4/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
and a Molex power splitter (unless you can find a floppy power > MINI SATA power adapter, which I can’t):
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000067SLY/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i01?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Most importantly it is worth noting that the drive is 9.5mm!! not 12.7mm slimline, the HP part code to use being 652241-B21 (although there are other 9.5mm drives available).
Hi Gareth, I got a Dell floppy->SATA power connector on eBay which works fine for powering a 2.5″ HDD.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-OEM-Dell-MX714-Floppy-FDD-to-Sata-Power-Converter-Cable-/400298253923?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5d33a29e63
I was a little worried about the right-angle connector, but it’s flexible enough to not be a problem.
I ran a 1′ SATA cable up from the motherboard to the drive, and the drive is held in place with some cardboard.
Hi Barry, I know most people won’t worry about fitting a DVD/RW drive, but I am talking about if you do want one don’t get caught out because the slim-line DVD drives actually uses a smaller type of SATA power connector (MINI-SATA) which I was completely unaware of, initially I ordered what you linked but have since realised that won’t work as its a regular SATA power size. In addition to this, the drive itself is also only 9.5mm not the more common 12.7mm slim-line.
After reviewing my order last night I’ve actually changed the cable I’ve ordered for the drive to this one:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004FIA6X4/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
As reading the reviews I suspect the SATA data cable will be too short on the one I originally linked.
Hi Gareth
Can you confirm that the cable you’re linkin to, is long enough when using the ODD caddy? Looks like a great clean solution. Got the caddy and the cable Barry links to from a friend, which doesn’t fit in the caddy plug. Don’t have the SATA cable either. Wasn’t aware that I needed it. So if it’s long enough, I’ll order it right away.
Thankz
Frank
Ohh, and are you sure that the power connector is correct? Hard to see on the picture, and can’t see it from the description. Is it correct, that HP is using a “special” power connector? Seems smaller than the normal power connector used i ordinary computers.
Hi guys, just as a final thing on the DVD drive, it turns out if you order the HP one (part code above) you get all the cabling you could possibly need with it (a HP cable to power it from the floppy power etc) I’ve got mine all in and working now. Next on my shopping list is a 1TB SSD for my Hyper-V VMs.
Hi Folks, I am making research for my ESXi server and I am curious if someone passthrough GPU to VM. I want to make one of the VM the gaming/multimedia VM.
Hi Frank,
The cable included in the server for the ODD bay is a floppy drive power connector. HP uses this on some of their ODD drives, but it is uncommon on non-HP ODD drives.
It is. I bought a converter from “floppy” to sata and just fitted a molex instead of sata – I needed some molex’s :)
Your still welcome to mail me Frank, if needed. my first name before @ and dintid.dk after :)
Thankz Morten. For now I will post her. Maybe someone else can use yours and others replies to my questions. If I should have any questions not quite relevant, I will sure write you :O) Thankz again.
Well, I got my hands on a SATA cable (had the power converter cable already), and got a HDD connected. I’ve set up the disk as an array 0 (single disk), and I can see it in ESXi via vSphere. But I can’t add the disk. I get the error:
Call “HostDatastoreSystem.QueryVmfsDatastoreCreateOptions” for object “ha-datastoresystem” on ESXi “xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx” failed.
I guess it’s because the disk is formatted. I’ve used the disk as NTFS disk for backup (no OS on). Is this a correct assumption? Can I format it as something else, that will make it possible to get around this error. From the KB article from VMware in regards to this issue, it is mentioned that GPT could be the cause, and access to a CLI and throwing in some commands, could solve it. But I’m unsure of how I would do this. How do I get access to the CLI? I’ve tried connecting using puTTy via SSH. No response.
The answer was to delete disk and partitions on the disk.
Hey Frank. I know it’s a bit late but for future reference, to get SSH, you need to go to the Configuration Tab then Security Profile, Properties, and Start the SSH Server Service. Then you can putty. While you’re there I’d select “start and stop service with host” so that it’s still up when you next reboot.
Then via putty you’d use vmfstools in order to repartition or reformat the disk.
Hope that helps
Mates,
the problem with 32GB for HP MS Gen8 may be in misunderstanding or misinform from HP what kind of UDIMMS are compatible, on single cpu servers and workstations U may use almost only (almost not on 100% its strange fact) SINGLE RANK UDIMMS (so not buffered or registered dimms like 1Rx8 or 1Rx16), if U bought dual rank dimms (like 2Rx4 or 2Rx8) it will not work, of course it also depends of installed CPU, but most xeons that fits on HP MS G8 is a single cpu limited CPUs so it uses only SINGLE RANK UDIMMS.
kind regards
NTShad0w
Why would you use single rank dimms when you can only get 4GB single ranks? The problem with 32GB for HP Microserver Gen8 is there are no 16GB Dual Ranks.
Just found another potential match for 16GB memory!
http://www.intelligentmemory.com/dram-modules/dram-modules.php?tab=01&_DDR3_DIMM
IMM2G72D3(L)DUD8AG
Technical Specifications
Capacity: 16GB
Form Factor: UDIMM
ECC: Yes
Pin-Count: 240
Organization: 2Gx72
Ranks: 2
Voltage for standart part: 1.5V
Low-Voltage part (L): 1.35V or 1.5V
Modul height (inch/mm) / 30
JEDEC Raw Card E
Speed-Options
Data-Rate Clock Rate Cycle Time
DDR3-1333 667MHz 1.5ns
DDR3-1600 800MHz 1.25ns
Comp. Capacity: 8Gb
Comp. Org: 1Gx8
Comp. Count: 18
Temperature Options
Commercial: 0 to 95°C tC
Industrial: -40 to 95°C tC
tC = Operating Case temperature
Who wants to give this a try?
Hello,
some days ago I also installed my Intel Xeon E3 1230v2 in my G8, but iLO is always showing a temperature of 40 degree celsius – sometimes up to 46. But this can’t be the real temperature with a Intel Xeon processor under high load. I read in some forums, that 40 degree celsius is the minimum temperature and a bug of the iLO 4. Flashed v1.32 yesterday – still the same issue.
Someone have the same issue or maybe a solution, what I could try?
It’s a well known bug with no solution from HP just like the ACPI and fan issue. We all have this issue :(
This is a great forum (though it really burns time on a Sunday afternoon).
I am running SBS 2003 on a N40L with three users and six computers. I was able to pick-up an oem SBS 2011 Standard for half-price to preserve some upgrade possibilities because I will not be going to the cloud and are into Outlook too deep to go without Exchange. I now realize my quiet, energy-efficient N40L is probably inadvisable for SBS 2011 — despite reports that it will load.
Although MS recommends a quad processor with 10gb as a minimum, anyone have experience or opinions on whether the HP MicroServer Gen8 using a g2020t will be sufficient for SBS light duty? Should I consider getting one with the possibility of upgrading to E3-1265Lv3?
Thanks!
Hey Mike. With so few users you will face no issues really. Just use 16GB of ram and a few fast drives.
When you have it all set up it’s not the CPU which is going to bottleneck you.. that will be drive IO.
I’m running Server 2012R2 hyper-v with 2 always on virtual machines, where one is Exchange 2013. Some time each day I have 1-2 other virtual machines running for backup and other tasks. Limitations always come Down to drive IO. So much I ended up buying an enterprise 480gb SSD!!
Morten: Thanks for the detail.
But to make sure, you are running with G2020T — or an E3-1265Lv3? If an E3, do you think a light-duty SBS would run OK under G2020T?
Thanks!
Does it still work OK with all 4 cores?
Hi Ben,
i’m checking your blog monthly to verify if there are any update about the healthy of your microserver g8 with the new processor.
Could you please let us know if you still have the xeon processor installed on and how it is going with it?
Thank you very much
Luigi
Hi, Luigi. I apologize for not making follow-up posts. The server is still up and running. I’m mostly using it as a ZFS / CrashPlan backup / media server at the moment which doesn’t produce a heavy load–but haven’t had any issues with it. Ben
Hi Ben,
thanks a lot for your reply, i just bought the processor, and i will install it as soon it will be shipped out :-)
I had a look at your problem, about the webserver, and in case you could not find a solution, you shall use a company i use for my virtual server: http://contabo.com/
they are the cheapest i ever meet in the market, static ip, and virtual server with 2 cores, 200 gb space, and 2 gb ram for only 7 euros (they are in Germany) per month.
Cheers
Luigi
Hi I have the Xeon E3-1265Lin mine and it runs 24/7. Has 2 Exchange Servers and 2 DC’s. Runs perfectly fine. With RAID on the B120i it’s very quiet now. And no heat issues at all.
I’ve had trouble connecting to the b3n.org site over several days. Is it the webservice that’s unstable? I’ve experienced it before.
Hi, Frank. Here’s why the website is unstable… my landlord sold our house out from under us so I had to move my family on short notice and all I could get was a house in a rural area with no internet (there are actually no phone lines to my house), fortunately I do get 4G LTE via Verizon wireless so I got a Millenicom plan with a static IP and used that for awhile but I had trouble staying under the 20GB monthly limit so I bought someone’s grandfathered unlimited data plan, but Verizon won’t give me an un-natted IP address unless I pay $500 for a static IP…I don’t want to pay $500 for a static IP because I’m not sure how long the unlimited plans will last, so I moved this website to one of my servers at my friend Jeff’s house (he has Verizon FIOS), but he’s running an old HP Microserver N40L (great little server, here’s my review: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2NNXYLGZ2L9J0/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B005KKJPCO&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag=) but my website become too much of a load for it and the MySQL database or Apache processes keep dying with an out of memory error … we have quite a bit running on that server under VMware. Web server, mail server, ZFS server, mumble server, etc. It just needs more memory but we’ve maxed it. Last night I enabled vmware’s host memory cache so that it could cache memory onto an SSD so I increased the RAM on the web server from 1GB to 2GB and I’m hoping that will increase stability. Long-term I should probably switch it over to nginx instead of Apache… or just get a beefier server. Or maybe just sign up for one of those hosting providers and have someone else host it.
Hope that explains it…
Ben
Ohh, I’m sorry to hear. Seems like alot of people is enjoying your website. What is the time horizon for getting the website up and running under whished for conditions?
Well, I have a Gen8, but my planned use, has been kind a shot down. Thought I could use it for Plex or something similar, transcoding my Blu-Ray rips to my PS3, cellular and tablets, but the processor can’t cope (Celeron). Wonder if the Intel could? Guess only an upgrade to the Xeon will help me, but the server is from my work, and I can’t begin changing components, when there’s still warrenty on it. So I got a Gen8, with 16GB RAM, four 4TB WD RED’s to no really use :O( For now the servers purpose is to serve some shares from a Windows machine run from a 2.5″ HDD in the ODD bay. Can’t figure out what else to use it for for now, other than run some systems for learning purposes in conjunction with work/education. Planing on installing Server 2012 R2 and play around with that. At the moment I got VMware 5.0 installed, and the one Win machine.
I have no idea what it would take to host your website in manpower/resources (never tried having a website). But if the timeline is reasonable and the handling/maintaining of the needed machines is manageable, maybe we can work something out. I have a public (static) IP address already. The server and the IP is in place already, at my place here in little Denmark. so economywise there should be no difference to me, hosting your website for a period. I don’t know with maintainance the website, if you can do this remote, but I guess that RDP sessions could get you access the the machines.
What do you think. If you think this as an option, we can continue communicating via email.
Br
Frank
Thanks for the offer, Frank. That’s very generous of you. For now I’m going to keep it where it’s at (the least amount of work) and hope the 2GB memory increase helps. But if you notice the site going down a lot feel free to drop another comment to let me know.
Thanks again,
Ben
Your welcome. Hope it works out :O)
Br
Frank
I’m using an E3-1230 V2. I ran using standard celeron with hyper-v and a DC and an Exchange 2013 up all the time. I bought a bigger CPU as I sometimes have a lot more running, so wanted the extra horsepower when needed.
I havn’t used SBS for several years, so what’s included now? Regardless of whats in it, I don’t think you will have any issues as long as you don’t use it as a terminal/rdp server.
I’m using all cores with HT enabled. I don’t think there is a heat issue as my fan/ilo doesn’t function well with my Raid controller (HP P410). Just to be sure I bought and mounted an Akase 25 cpu fan.
Mine runs 24/7 running as a domain controller, file share server, hyper-v host, CCTV running also no problems. (E3-1230 V2)
Which versions of Exchange are you using? Asking as my Exchange 2013 is using 11GB all on its own :)
Has anyone had any success using a HP Microserver Gen8, with the HP P222 in PCI-Passthrough mode?, I’m currently running a G8, with a P222, and a Xeon E1230v2. I’m having massive issues getting it to work, I’ve configured an array, and copied quite a sizable amount of data to it, and want to run it as a ‘virtual NAS’ and use 2x SSD’s on B120i in RAID1 with ESXi running off SD. However, it appears that its either not working due to ‘issues’ some people mention to do with Ivy Bridge based CPU’s or due to the P222 not being ACS capable (device not being able to passed through, due to on switched/shared PCI bus).
I’ve tried EVERY tweak/fix I can find running ESXi in Passthru for a RAID card that I can find, using v5.0, v5.1, v5.5, all seem to fail in different ways. Basically on a *nix VM with the P222 passed through to the VM (in v5.0 and v5.1) the OS of the Guest simply ‘hangs’ and detection of the hardware (udev timeout) and I have to wait about 1 minute for the VM to boot (usual 5-10 seconds), and on v5.5, it completely fails and cant register the device, however many people state that PCI Passthrough is completed screwed/extra-picky on v5.5
Any help, or suggestions, or other peoples experiences similar to my scenario as above, would be greatly appreciated. Not quite sure I want to have 12TB array in VMDK’s on a RAID5 just yet :S
I’ve had a P410 in the system, but couldnt get passthrough to work on that either, and also had a disk failure, and because of ILO4 not understanding HP P410′s (no idea why not!) yet, I didnt know about my raid failure (degraded) until about a week later, thus the hurried purchase of the HP Smart Array P222 card.. .
On a slightly related note, does anyone running a P222 receive a Critical temperature alert on the P222 in the ILO4 due to the temperature of PCI1 going to 103C (it auto-recovers and settles at 90~C after about 30 seconds).
Can’t answer the passthrough question, but according to Hp datasheet for the microserver, only the P222 controller is officially compliant with the microserver (look under ‘Storage controller).
http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA4-7034ENW&doctype=data%20sheet&doclang=EN_US&searchquery=&cc=dk&lc=da
Just want to share my setup with you guys. Firts of all, many thanks for this great info resource you shared here, It helped a lot.
I have a microsever gen8, formerly a G2020T but later on I replaced my cpu with an Intel Xeon E3-1230V2 and 16GB RAM.
Installed one GC Asus HD 6450 2GB. With ESXI 5.5 I wasn’t able turn on my WindowVM with passthrough to this GC.
I decided to upgrade my ESXI to 6.0 and after this, the passthrough to my Radeon HD 6450 is working fine. The only drawback I am facing is whenever that I need to remove the passthrough to the AUDIO HDMI because it lets the streaming with metalic sound and choppy. To solve the audio issue, I am using a USB Analog & Digital Audio Adapter MICRO II that I formerly used with my Turtle Beach Headset in my XBOX 360. For those who is interested in gaming in a VM machine I found this interesting article https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Multi-headed-VMWare-Gaming-Setup-564/
Anyone here tried using the P222 to see if iLO (read the fan) don’t spin like crazy as it does when I’m using my P410
Can’t confirm it, but the 410 isn’t combatible according to the data sheet from HP, only the P222.
Hi Frank. They are not sold anywhere, that I’m aware of. If I get around to It (if my back allows measuring my server), I can make a drawing of it. Mine is still at prototype level, as my back is killing me. Going to have a “full” bodycast (back and one leg) on tormorrow, and for 3 weeks, so have to wait till after that, since my server is hidden behind a lot of stuff.
I can attache 2x 4 drives directly to the P410 I have. P410 accepts SAS drives, which the build in does not.
Right now, I actually have 3 drives in the ODD bay. 2 SAS HDDs which I run in raid 1 for Host OS. And a single SAS SSD where i’ve put my Exchange for now.
I have 4x 1TB WD RE drives mounted normally.
I just made a post at my site with the Photos I’ve taken of my server. Easier to explain that way :)
I have tried having Guest OS on alle possible different volumens, and never had any issues. Always installed using Intelligent Provisioning. Only very small issue I ever experienced is Provisioning cant find firmware for my P410 when looking for updates, but that is rather irrelevant for me anyway, as I want to update firmware manually.
The url is: http://www.itnotes.eu/?p=1588
Either the site filtered it out before, or I forgot to add it :)
I don’t think there’s any link filtering, everyone’s initial post gets stuck in a queue which I approve every couple of days then after that you’re a trusted poster. |:-)
Hi,
I too picked up one of these a couple of months ago, and have been experimenting around to find an optimal configuration. Here are a couple of observations – all with an AC power meter connected. It’s a unit that handles power factor != 1, so Watts and Volt Amps are shown separately.
– The E3-1230V2 CPU works just fine, without deactivating cores or hyperthreading.
– I ran 8 concurrent instances of burnp6 under Linux while watching the CPU temperature using the lm-sensors. It got up to about 85°C. This bears little resemblance to the temperature indicated by iLO, which was showing something like 45°C! Note: this is an extreme test! Use cautiously and at your own risk! Under this test, power consumption hits 150W input (the PSU rating) for this fully loaded system with 4x 7200rpm 3TB Seagate drives, 1x SSD, 16G Kingston ECC RAM (2x 8G) and an LSI SAS9211-8i (reflashed in IT mode). No load, with drives spun down is about 50W, but 10W of that is just the HBA card.
– The minimum fan speed is a fickle thing. There are comments on a HP forum where the minimum speed is related to whether a HP disk is installed or not. This appears to be partly true: The BIOS appears to read the airflow temperature through the disk cage using SMART parameters on the disk, and adjust the airflow accordingly. If no drive is connected to the controller, or it is being operated in an incompatible mode the BIOS defaults to 39% fan speed just to make sure things stay cool. E.g. with VMWare 5.1 (HP image) running, connecting and disconnecting a blank drive on the single SATA position (slot 5) makes the system fan speed up and slow down again some seconds after reconnection.
– The next step is to pass the LSI HBA through VMWARE with the 4x 3TB to a VM running ZFS for Linux (Raid Z1). This obviously needs the Xeon CPU upgrade to access this hardware feature.
Hi Richard,
How long did you run these tests for? and what software did you run on linux to monitor cpu temperatures?
Hi James,
On max load (8 cores at 100%) for about 10-15 mins. I don’t anticipate the continuous load under VMware being anything like this, so was happy with this time. It was also how long it took for the CPU temperature to stabilise. From an engineering perspective, the 35W heatsink is not rated for this power (69W), but for my purposes and load scenario I’m happy to take the risk.
I used the Ubuntu package “lm-sensors”, and then just the ‘sensors’ command.
Passthrough for a LSI SAS/SATA 9211-8i controller through ESXi 5.1 into a virtual machine works fine too.
Ah kool i never got the pass through working for Im-sensors in ESXi always displays 100 degrees.
I ended up buying 1230v2 aswell, was initially worried but i haven’t been able to utilise all the cores with everyday use for long periods of time, so its been good in terms of heat
As you say, it just ticks along fine giving fantastic VM performance & responsiveness.
When I did the temperature testing it was without ESXi, just Ubuntu 12.04 directly. A live system will do.
As they are flogging these boxes for AU$349 (approx US$ 300) here now (ref Budget PC) I picked up a second one to use as a FreeNAS file server. The all-in-one solution was elegant, but just too risky. This way there is potentially a full kit of spares to get the other box going again if/when one breaks down.
With regard to access to HP firmware, they sent out a different email to people in Australia, after being fined $3 million by the ACCC a year ago for misleading consumers about warranty rights. It contained the following paragraph:
———-
Notwithstanding the above, our products come with consumer guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law (ACL). Nothing in this letter excludes or limits any right or remedy, or any guarantee, warranty or other term or condition implied or imposed by the ACL which cannot be excluded or limited. Therefore, if you are a consumer within the meaning of the ACL you may still be entitled to server firmware updates and SPP in accordance with your rights under the ACL even if you do not have an active support agreement, HP CarePack or HP Limited warranty. Please visit Contact HPand call our technical support team so that we can assess your entitlement. For further information on consumer rights, visit http://www.accc.gov.au/consumerguarantees.
————
I rang them to get them to “assess my entitlement”, but none of the various people I spoke to had any idea above the above recommendation. So I’m still trying to get myself registered as a ‘consumer’ with them.
I checked with intelligent memory, their 16GB modules are not going to work because of Intels lack of support in the chipset, specifically the memory reference code. Seems their 16GB modules have been approved for Atom C2000 based systems, so maybe worth to hang on for a box based on that platform
Richard M.,
Please do let us know if you get the LSI working in PCI passthrough with ESXi; I couldn’t get my LSI card (9240 flashed into LSI 9211 IT mode) working in passthrough mode on ESXi 5.5.
I posted about it on the FreeNAS forums: http://forums.freenas.org/threads/vt-d-pci-passthrough-with-esxi-5-5-and-lsi-9240-in-it-mode.17085/
I also couldn’t get passthrough working using an Adaptec 5405 which works fine in other servers. Possible issue with passthrough on the microserver? The latest patches fix the initial issues with passthrough in 5.5, have you tried patching 5.5 to the latest version?
The LSI9211 just worked in pass-through mode. But I had seen some other comments regarding difficulties getting it working with vmware 5.5, so stuck with 5.1.0 Update 1 with the HP custom image from September 2013.
Interestingly I had this box running Ubuntu 12.04 with ZFS on Linux directly on the 5th disk, and was getting scrub speeds of 500 MB/s using 4x ST3000DM001 in raidz (3+1) on the LSI controller. After I trnasferred an image of this OS configuration into a VM and passed the controller through into the VM the scrub speed remained the same. So the performance is fantastic, and making this storage available to other VMs using the vmware internal network connection removes the 100MB/s ‘limitation’ of Gigabit Ethernet.
Hi Guys,
I have an question about the supported memory. I have 16GB PC3-10600, but i think it is registered memory. This is supported or is there a way to still make it work?
UDIMM only
Anyone noticed you now have to pay for Updates your HP equipment?
This one is on Microserver Gen8 drivers site:
Important note: HP ProLiant Server firmware access
Starting February 2014, an active warranty or contract is required to access HP ProLiant Server firmware updates. Security and safety updates do not require an active warranty or services contract. View your existing contracts & warranties or get help linking contracts or warranties to your HP Support Center user profile. To obtain additional support coverage, please contact your local HP office, HP representative, or visit Contact HP. Click here for more information.
I myself have just spend 2, almost 3 weeks trying to get a Service Contract on a piece of HP hardware, but nobody can sell one to me, as I’m not a business… this does not bode well!
And press release.
http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Technical-Support-Services-Blog/Customers-for-life/ba-p/154423#%2EUvdtmfX8Itd
Don’t see this as a as good thing as HP makes it sound. At least not for home consumers. Buisinesses proberly already have agreements in place.
Me too i noticed and i am no happy at all, hope this will not effect the intelligent provisioning as well, because having a service contract is a serious stuff, and costly.
It’s really sad, and nobody wanted to sell me anything as a private person. I had to buy it through a Company in my Family. HP is really alienating a lot of costumers this way.
Along with all the other experiences I’ve had with this microserver and how HP handles home consumers, I’m NEVER buying HP again. NEVER.
Is it possible to assign more video RAM by adding a physical graphicscard to the server, and assign it to a virtual machine? I’m playing with XBMC on a Win 7 machine, and I’ve set video RAM to 128MB, but mouse movement and menu handling is really choppy. I was playing with the idea of running XBMC on this virtual machine as a master ( via UPnP), and running clients on devices which should give me some fuctions like remembering where I stop playback fx. Anyone here played around with XBMC and this master/client functions?
For those who have a 1230v2, has anyone tried to change the HP power profile in the bios to underclock it to bring it within the 35 to 50watt range, if so will this significantly degrade the performance?
Anyone manage to get HTTPS working on the ILO, its driving me nuts
Hello James. I’m using HTTPS just fine.
Only issue I’m having, if you can call it that, is HPs limited certificate choices where I can’t use an existing certificate I have.
Hi Morten,
Is it enabled by default? I cant find an option in the ILO to start the service. Best i could find was Administration–> Access Settings
NVM, just had to clear broswer cache for it to work, Yeh would have been good if we could use our own self signed or verisign cert
Hi Ben (or anyone else),
Do you have any benchmarks of the AES-NI on your setup?
I’d love to see `cryptsetup benchmark` results, as I have a N40L which I don’t encrypt because it’s way too slow without this..
Hi All,
Hi recently bought a HP Proliant Microserver gen8 g1610t
My hardware configuration:
– Intel Xeon E3-1265L2
– 1x Kingston 8GB ECC DDR3 1600 System Specific Memory Model KTH-PL316E/8G
– 2x WD Red SATA 6 Gb/s WD40EFRX, 4TB (Raid 1 in Slot 1 & 2)
– 2x WD Green SATA 6Gb/s WD20EARX, 2TB (Raid 1 in Slot 3 & 4)
– 1x Samsung 840 EVO 120GB (In ODD Bay)
– Radeon HD 6450 Noiseless Edition
My software configuration:
– VMware ESXi 5.1 HP Version
– virtual Media PC
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bits
Samsung 840 EVO 120GB passthrough for OS
ATI Radeon HD6450 passthrough to Yamaha RX-V775 AV receiver (Sound & Video)
USB2.0 & 3.0 passthrough for keyboard/mousen en USB storage when needed
XBMC running movies from Virtual NAS
– Virtual NAS
XPEnolgoy 4.3 with virtual storage
Everything runs smooth, the ATI Radeion passthrough is really a nice feature :)
Sounds like a great setup. I had given up on the PCI graphics passthrough but it sound like you cracked it. I went for a geforce 210 but I think I will sell it and get a 6450 instead and try that too. Did you have to enter the pcihole settings on the vmx config?
Well i did have some problems with the passthrough in the beginning.
Please be aware that coping and pasting the PCIhole settings from the internet in the setting file doesn’t work.
You have to type it manually because the ‘ or ” is different when you paste it.
I’m not sure if I used both the start and end PCIhole setting. If you like, I can upload my config file so you can compare.
The ATI Radeon 6450 works great and is very cheap :)
Hey, Jeroen, I got the 6450 working which is good but I cant seem to passthrough the sound pci component (6400 hdmi sound). I’m using ESXi 5.5 U1. I’m going to try 5.1 next to see if it’s an issue with 5.5.
Hi Rustyf,
I upgraded VMware from 5.1 to 5.5 because of the 2TB store limit.
After the upgrade i had the option to create a datastore of 4tb but passthrough didn’t work anymore.
Not sure what i’m going to install now.
Reinstalling 5.1 fixed the passthrough for the USB 2.0 ports. So I’m down to two issues now:
1) No sound device found on my HD6450 (I assume because the HDMI audio PCI component won’t passthrough
2) Video playback is choppy
I’m going to resolve 1 by getting a USB-to-Optical out adapter and just avoid the passthrough issue.
Still investigating 2.
Hi,
When in AHCI mode, does ESXi see the ODD SATA controller seperatly from the main 4 bay controller?
I want to use the ODD SATA port for ESXI storage but pass the 4 bays through to a FreeNAS VM. I can’t use another SATA card as I already have the slot filled by an extra NIC I need…
Install ESXi on the internal USB or SD card.
Then you can use all 5 drives for your ESXi hosts.
Thanks, perhaps I wasn’t clear what I wanted to do…
I will use a USB boot drive anyway because you can’t boot from the ODD port.
I want to use an SSD on the ODD port that is for ESXi shared storage, used for many vmdk’s for many small VM’s.
For one VM only, I want to use all 4 of the front bays, without ESXi managing them, so the VM can access the controller/drive SMART status.
i.e. the B120i card in AHCI needs to be passed into a single VM using PCI-passthough (VT-d) but the ODD port needs to remain available…
Whilst it seems the B120i can be passed through OK, I don’t know if it can be separated from the ODD port, and if it works in AHCI mode…
Thanks!
After chaning my P410 to the compatible P222 my fan-speed are now properly controlled by iLo. It Means it right now is spinning at 29% instead of always going over 40%, which was very loud (in my ears at least).
I just swapped the Cards and the new one recognized my raid setup.
Anyone here got the two USB 3.0 ports working with USB 3.0 support? The USB 2.0 ports work fine, and I can connect 3.0 equipment to the USB 2.0 ports with no trouble. Only I don’t have the 3.0 support. USB 2.0 equipment work fine in the 3.0 ports. I have ESXi 5.0 with Win 7 virtual machines running on it. Not sure if it’s ESXi, HP IP or Win that should have a driver update? Wondering if I should install latest SPP maybe? I’m not running latest version IP 1.60. Think it’s 1.4 or 1.5. I have not yet tried to install a SPP, so that will be a first.
I’ve used USB3 with an external USB3 WD drive. Was with Server 2012r2 though, so sounds like software/driver issue. I can’t remember which port I used exactly, except it was USB3 for speed.
Hmm, played around with the USB disk. I was not entirely correct, when I stated that it worked with the USB 2.0 ports. The LED lid up, but the disk never appeared in Windows. I’ve now tried looking in the settings for the guest OS, and if I try to add a USB Controller, I can only choose xHCI, and I get a warning on this page stating, that “This controller is not supported for this guest operating system”. So guess it’s a combatability between ESXi and some Win OS’s. If anyone knows either a work around or what I need to do, to get this working, I’d like to hear it.
Br
Frank
Am I wrong to assume, that I won’t get this working, from what is tated in this KB from VMware?:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2041591
Else I have to buy a PCI card with USB 3.0 and do passthough, to make USB 3.0 available to my OS.
I’m selling the HP Microserver (with Xeon processor) on Ebay: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=271475895778&ssPageName=ADME:X:AAQ:US:1123
I’ve decided to switch over to my custom server build. I still think the Microserver is a great machine (except for requiring a license to use ILO), but I want more than 4 drive bays and don’t want to keep paying for ILO licenses. Maybe I’ll get another one when the Gen9s come out.
I’m having trouble making my USB DVD drive show up in my virtual machines. I’m running Win7, and it doesn’t show up in the add new USB unit section in VMware. Anyone having inputs to why I can’t get this working?
Can you try it on a USB 2.0 port?
Hi Ben
Sorry. Can see I didn’t wrote that. I have both tried in the USB 3.0 and 2.0 (both front and back). No luck.
Br
Frank
Still can’t get it to work. I’ve tried rebooting the server. Still no luck.
Frankly, the only way I got the passthrough working on the USB 2.0 ports (and for GFX) was to downgrade to ESX 5.0. I lost count of how many ESX installs I got through.
Sadly, I do run official ESX 5.0 from HP already :O(
Are you able to passthrough mouse and keyboard, i.e. is it just the drive not working? Or is passthrough not working at all? Has it stopped working?
I havn’t tried plugging in mouse or keyboard, but I’ve been using USB 2.0 HDD, and they work. Somehow I just seem to remember the USB 3.0 ports also to work, both for 2.0 USB HDD and my charging/connection cable for my Garmin GPS watch before. And they don’t work now.
Well, seems that USB CD-ROM/DVD drives are not supported as hot plug:
But you can still get it to work though :O)
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1027415
This is just a test post….
Is it possible to turn of the blue status led?
Doesn’t seem like it. I would like to turn it off too, but can’t find anyone who has found a good solution. People are duck taping it, or pluggin it out the LED of its fitting, and pointing it away. Some are even suggesting cutting the wires. Don’t do that though, since the LED fuctions as warning light if errors occur.
Anyone ever managed to install 2x 16gb blocks to a total of 32gb ram? Must say I’m on my way to looking for a new board due to lack of 16gb blocks, sad to say.
Also still really annoyed at the very noisy fan even though I actually bought a P222 as it should be supported and thus speed down the fan. But it didn’t compared to when I had an P410 raid controller.
Lack of support for 32GB is very frustrating, with a Xeon in and SSD for VMs its a very capable machine. Using dynamic memory within Hyper-V helps but it would be oh so much more capable with 32GB instead of 16GB. As for noise, I personally find it pretty good (bordering on quiet) especially when compared to my ML110 G7.
I’ve found several alternatives. All mini-itx and all with full management capabilities without extra license cost. All of them are build on Atom C2750 SoC (quad or octa core soldered on cpu – very capable)
1) Supermicro A1SRi-2758F – Supports 64gb ram, but it is SO-DIMM so going to be hard to find ram. I’d rather wait than buy this I think.
2) Asrock has a very promising quad C2550D4I and octa-core C2750D4I board. 64gb ECC udimm ram blocks. I’m currently talking to their supplier in Holland/netherland reagarding 16gb ram blocks.
3) Gigabyte just made a new board GA-9SISL. Supports 32gb (4x8gb) and has 4 quality intel ethernets.
hi,
the HP ProLiant Gen8 doesn’t allow hot-plug, i’m i right?
so does exist any BIOS mod to run that feature? didn’t find anything on the net (except for N40L und N54L).
cheers,
libroc
In RAID mode it does not support hotplug, but it should allow hotplug in AHCI mode.
ok, but still no BIOS mod out there? a pitty.
I can’t see the table with possible processors. which processor is he best option for the Gen8?
Well, looks like the table died… I must have used some wordpress plugin that broke. This page probably has the best current information: http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/6596-hp-microserver-gen8-processor-faq/ In general I think the Xeon E3-1230v2 had the most performance and features per dollar and is what I ran in my Gen8 Microserver.
Hi,
Does anyone know If I buy an ILO license from the USA can I use it on my UK Gen8?
Everything is more expensive over here! haha,
Hi guys i have plan to buy Microserver and want to fill with more than 3 TB SATA drives, doe’s the server handle bigger disk or it’s limited to 3 TB only as HP stated
Officially 3TB, but unofficially some people have gotten 4TB to work: http://sammit.net/hp-proliant-microserver-gen8-supports-4tb-drives/
Thanks Ben i have another question, have you tried to burn installed Xeon E3-1230 V2 with burning utility like Prime95 or InteLburntest 2.54, if yes what temperature did you get. I recommend Hwinfo utility to measure temperature from CPU sensor and not use ILO sensors which is incorrect
Thanks for the tip on using hwinfo, I wasn’t aware there was an issue with the ILO sensors. I’d run a test with hwinfo for you but I’ve sold my Microserver and did a custom build around the DS-380 chassis so I don’t have access to one…. if you do find that information somewhere let me know as I’m curious. Preferably someone should run the same hwinfo test before swapping the processor out.
Dear Folks :)
Do you know information about the 2 eth ports? One is shared with iLO? so is it true, that i cannot use the 2 gigabit eth port _and_ ilO at the same time? :(
There are a total of three ethernet ports. One is dedicated for iLO.
thx :)
As above, it has two Gigabit ports and the dedicated iLO port, I’ve also got an NC365T in mine so have a further 4 Gigabit ports. I’ve got 2 x 4TB WD HDDs in mine running without issue (no further configuration required)
Maybe someone tried to install 2x16GB RAM into the Gen8 MS?
Is it working or should I forget it?
Thanks your answers!
Someone tried to install 32Gb memory in MS GEN8 succesfully? Is it possible or should i forget this idea?
Thank your answer!
NobertK, it is not possible to install 2x 16GB ram blocks.
I tried doing it with multiple different configurations of RAM. Both ECC and non-ECC. Simply just a no-go.
Hello Mike,
As an owner of the first N36 HP microserver, i was very content with the design and the fact that it was very silent.
Only the performance was not fit for the things I did with this server.
So exit N36 !
Your blog about the upgrade of the HP microserver Gen8 Celeron version is very usefull, and gave me the right rush to start the project again with this new Gen8 server.
So I ordered a Gen8 with Celeron, and the Xeon E3-1230V2 processor.
Celeron will be replaced by the new E3 CPU.
Purpose of the machine is running Hyper-V 2012R2 (gui version) as a hypervisor.
16Gb memory
4 x 3Gb WD harddisk in raid 1+0
On top of that a Windows 2012R2 virtual machine with DC function and Exchange 2013 as my mail server.
As an extra bonus the XPEnology Hyper-V solution to create a Synology virtual NAS.
Checkout this wonderful solution, if you want more info go to http://www.xpenology.nl/
(sorry, as far as I know only Dutch, but with screenshots.)
So I’m pretty curios how that will perform.
I will let you know if everything is uo and running
Anyway Benjamin, many thanks for your info concerning this brilliant piece of hardware, and the info about the CPU swap.
Jan Arie Koelewijn
Holland
Heya Jan. Your setup is going to run very nicely. I know, as I’m running it now :)
Run 2012 R2 as Hyper-V host. 2012r2 as a DC and one more as Exchange 2013. I have a third 2012 as DC for other domain as well :¨)
I can recommend using Altaro Backup as it is free for ever for backing up 2 guest system. Using server backup for the host.
I actually ended up selling my Xeon and am running everything on the Celeron CPU!
THX Morton for your info.
Today is the day, Gen8 will be delivered.
Anyone know why HP isn’t releasing custom ESXi 5.5 version for HP Gen8 servers?
There is a custom ESXi5.5 iso available, ESXi5.5 Update 2.
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=HP-ESXI-5.5.0U2-GA&productId=353
You need a VMWare account download the iso, you can create a free account on there website.
How come this isn’t available with HP at
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/servers/solutions.html?compURI=1499005#tab=TAB4
Anyone here running this ESXi 5.5 image problem free? I’m definetly going to put ESXi 5.5 on my server, if everything works (drivers, fan, etc.).
Br
Frank
Hi,
I have 5.5 running on it but I have been unable to make the PCI passthrough to work. In some forums I’ve read there is a problem with passthrough and 5.5 but there wasn’t any technical details so not sure.
In any case I’m pondering a downgrade just to check.
Cheers,
Antonio Huete
5.5 definitely doesn’t work – the release notes detail this. 5.1 update 1 is the latest you can use. this is what I use – currently for HBA card but previously for GFX card
Benjamin, you say “I thought it wise to at least go into the BIOS and disable 3.7GHz Turbo, so the max we’ll hit is 3.3GHz.”
Did you mean the Turbo Boast option in the F9 BIOS ?
there is nothing mentioned about 3.7Ghz.
THX
Yes, that’s the option. However, I don’t think there’s a need to disable it… I don’t believe the Turbo will engage unless only one core is in use so it wouldn’t contribute to thermal issues. Thanks, Ben
i think the cheapest solution to make a silent fan is to use a zenner diode at 6v , or 7v or 5v …. You can play using more diode @ diferent voltaje until you get a better vent at low sound
My G16010T was around 27-32% on the fans…I had an SSD on the optical SATA port and even had the native HP RAID 0 for this drive…finally put in 4x 3TB drives for storage only and put then on RAID 10…rebooted and presto it’s now running at 6%…I kid you not…
is it still working fine? :) I wanna get this and upgrade to Xeon but I’m not sure how’s going to last in time with that “monster” 69W TDP. Am looking to do some Plex Transcoding 1080p movies, any idea if it’s going to handle that?
I sold my Microserver awhile ago but I never had any problems with it. It will easily handle Plex Transcoding of 1080p… the Default Celeron should be able to do it as well.
Thanks for the reply, ben!
Unfortunately the Celeron can’t handle 1080p, a friend of mine has it. It can do 720p no problems, but when it comes to 1080p it freezes from time to time. Of course, this depends on the needed output + subtitle, but definitely isn’t up for the job in most cases.
Cheers!
+1 to this. I’ve got the Celeron processor, running Plex on Ubuntu 14.04LTS on ESXi. I havn’t run 720p, but 1080p it can’t handle. I can see the processor running 100% at all time. I can run DVD’s.
Thanks for the info, well, then I stand corrected on the Celeron. I guess trans-coding must take advantage of the extra cores on the Xeon.
Well, Plex recommends at least 2.4 GHz (the Celeron is 2.3 GHz) dual core processor for transcoding. When running ESXi, plus a virtual server for Plex, plus any other virtual machines one should have, I guess we can’t expect the Celeron to be able to catch up :O) Man, I should had gone with the Pentium. Well, I just have to get the Xeon ;O)
I am about to buy microserver and since I only have experiance with synology, without using RAID, I have some questions.
I want to install VMware and use sever for backups, nas4free, LAMP servers and some testing and maybe some more things in the future.
1. If i configure 4x3tb WD red in RAID 10 now, will i be able to upgrade to M1015 card in the future without problems or will I have to configure something? What about uprgrading CPU to xeon?
2. Where should I install OS (VMware) on separate hdd/ssd/usb or on the same disks as virtual system will be runing (4x3tb WD red)?
3. Can i use ZFS with built in controller card and how do I set this up?
4. Also what benefits do I get using 2 1gb ethernet connections on 1gbps network?
Just to let you know (in case you want to update your table in the main post) that I have just installed a Xeon E3-1220 v2 in mine and it also works fine.
Super, it was very helpful while choosing a processor upgrade for my Proliant Microserver Gen8.
I’ve installed a Xeon E3-1265L V2 and the server is running centos 6 very smoothly now (4core with hyperthreading).
Hi Guys,
Thanks for all the postings in this thread and especially Ben for starting it.
It helped me allot in deciding which way to go with my Gen8.
I just bought the following:
2x Kingston Kthpl316e/8g, 8gb 1600mhz (this one is HP certified)
1 x Intel Xeon E3-1230V2
As soon As I receive them I will build the system and report my findings here.
As for he cooling, I found this cooler:
http://www.overclock.net/products/id-cooling-is-vc45-vapor-chamber-cpu-cooler-low-profile
Will it fit?
It’s a bit expensive but if it works it is worth the money.
But from what I read here it might not even be necessary, I will mainly use the Gen 8 to run ESXI running 2 VM’s (one running Ubuntu and one running expenology) and occasionally run some labs with 2 or 3 servers.
So never more then 5 vm’s.
Anyway any input is welcome.
Hi Freno,
Have you tried this cooler ?
I am looking for one for my config without much luck!!
All I can add, is that my Gen8 is quite heavy loaded:
Xeon E3-1230 v2
16 GB Memory
1 x 120GB SSD
1 x 1TB SSD
1 x 6TB HDD
1 x 4TB
The HP 9.5mm Jack Black DVD-RW
HP NC365T (HP 4 port gigabit NIC)
HP TPM
And I’ve been running it like that for probably over 12 months now 24×7, with atleast 2 VMs always running (on top of the 2012 R2 host) with no issues on the standard cooling.
Hello,
What is your % for the FAN ?
With the Celeron G1610T but with an additionnal RAID card (HP P421), i’ve got a 11% continuous FAN speed.
Wondering if th high TDP of this E3-1230 V2 CPU would give a much higher % for the FAN.
Thanks!
Yes, it will.
My Gen8 is fitted with a E3-1220 and the fan runs in the 25%-40% range, depending on the ambiant temp..
E3-1240V2 works as well with turbo and hyper-threading.
Hi Everybody,
I have been following this page for a While and a couple of months back it inspired me to buy Xeon en do the upgrade.
With the information here it was really easy to perform the upgrade and everything seems to be working fine.
The only issue I have is the 40C temperature bug.
Is there any fix available for this?
I already upgraded to the newest ILO firmware and the latest firmware seems to be present on the server. (11-09-2013 bt there seems to be an A version also but does not seem to fix the issue).
I have run a stress test with stress linux from a bootable usb and after 30 minutes stress test it does not seem to go over 58 C according to LM sensors so I think I am safe, never the less I woul like to be able to monitor my temps in ESX which depends on the ILO.
Hello,
Your bios’ version isn’t the latest one: 06/06/2014 is the latest.
By the way, I recommend you to update through the latest HP SPP available (04/09/2015) you can pick up there: http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?sp4ts.oid=5390291&swItemId=MTX_8f34f27973a04a71b211d728ab&swEnvOid=4168
Do you have a PCIE card installed?
If not, after all updated components, could you please post your % CPU fan ?
HI Vahad,
Thank you very much for this info, do you know if this firmware fixes the temperature readings bug?
Also when I click on obtain software I get this error:
Access to the kiosk product denied.
Possible reason is: A wrong URL link of your site is provided to Software Depot.
I guess I need an account, can I create an account with the serial nr. from my GEN8? I still have support as mine is less then a year old.
Or can I get this software form somewhere else?
I do not have any PCI-E card in my system.
Once I have the temperature thing sorted out I will post my temp readings.
Hello,
I highly recommend you to have a look to this forum: http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/9195-new-service-pack-2015040-9-apr-2015/
They have posted the FTP link to retrieve the SPP.
You will be able to update your bios, ilo to 2.10 version and so on.
It might resolve your bug that i’m not aware of.
I am looking forward your feedback regarding your CPU fan percentage as I am also willing to buy such Xeon and noise is a concern.
Thanks.
HI Vahad,
Thanx for the Link.
Lots of problems reported with this SPP. Scary. :(
Anyway, just need the firmware. ILO already on latest version.
As soon as I have the updates I will post my readings.
Hi Vahad,
Sadly the firmware update did not solve my issue.
ILO still states 40C for CPU.
In the meantime I ran some tests with stress linux and with a windows live CD and prime95 and had some contradicting readings.
With stress Linux the sensors showed around 62 Celsius but with the Hirens boot cd and Prime95 I got over the 72 C and stopped Prime after 30 minutes when it started to hit 72 just to be safe.
I must say I had to use the HWiNFO to check my temperature as there where no other monitoring tools in the Hirens boot cd.
So I am not sure what is the correct reading.
When I had the server in my Study with enough room and ventilation around it, the sound of the ventilators was ok but now I have it in the electrics cabinet and I can hear it blowing through the door (the sound that is).
Anyway,
Hope someone here has a tip on how to get the temperature readings in the ILO working with the XEON installed as I have looked for weeks now without having any luck.
Anybody found a fix for the 40C ILO temperature readings bug?
Use Aida64, it fails to read the CPU temp but it reads properly the core temperatures.
Looks like a pretty decent setup. It is good to see as its been a long time coming given the pace of computing.
I’ve been running VMware Fusion on n i7a Mac Mini for years- it cost me $900 then but they are now much cheaper. I added a SATA disk so it would run on a mirrored internal Apple RAID, which has never missed a beat. The twin 500GB disks have run 24×7 for 4 years now, so time to upgrade to SSD maybe. It has the lightening port so last year I added 16GB RAM and a drobo external RAID array for backup and possibly to run VMs on if it was stable and fast enough- which it is.
Of course I did this long before these mini servers came out. My experience with many of these cheap devices are the power supplies and oftentimes other bits fail in short order but I’m very happy with this quiet, low power setup I have for a standalone virtual host. I don’t have to mess with ESXi windows only client either, and I can use the Mac mini’s GUI as an emergency desktop as it has its own screen, whenever I need one (all running on a monster UPS). The Mini runs nice and cool too and is whisper quiet. OSX is well supported and my DRP is straight forward like with ESXi. Fusion lacks some features but its solid; I’ve never had a Host/Guest failure.
Once I got this running I was able to ditch my old HP ML370 ESXi 4.1 host, it blew such a gale none of us in the house could sleep! The internal RAID 1+0 SCSI array was pretty impressive and always filled us with confidence though. I reckon one of the 3 banks of fans in that thing used more power than the mac mini does. I didn’t ever have to turn on the room heater… LOL!
Hi Ben,
Nice guide here.
Just a quick question: have you updated bios and/or ilo since writing this guide? If so, are you getting a correct temperature read out on the CPU?
Thanks.
Hi, FCM. I sold my Gen8 Microserver awhile back. I didn’t like having to pay for an ILO license to keep the KVM over IP connected and wanted something a little more powerful. I’ve switched over to home-built Supermicro servers and I’m much happier with that setup (KVM over IP is free). I’m currently running this: https://b3n.org/supermicro-2u-zfs-server-build/ and also this which is about the same footprint as the Gen8 Microserver: https://b3n.org/supermicro-x10sdv-f-build-datacenter-in-a-box/
Thanks,
Ben
Ben, been really good reading your article, sime great ideas, hower some time has elapsed since it first started and I see the gen 8 1610T is back on for a good price but as most if the Xeons v2 listed are now end of life what would a modern alternative that works well be please?
Thanks
Mark
Hi, Mark.
If you don’t mind a DIY solution my latest Supermicro build https://b3n.org/supermicro-x10sdv-f-build-datacenter-in-a-box/ has the same form factor as the Gen8 Microserver using Intel’s new Xeon D. It is a pricey build but with 8 physical broadwell cores and up to
64GB128GB memory it offers a lot of power in one box and very little power consumption. You could use an Avoton board to save money–however since you said the V2 is dated you’re probably looking for something more powerful like the Xeon-D build. For a pre-built supported solution like the HP Microserver I don’t know of anything that’s had a recent hardware refresh, I imagine most manufacturers are going to skip Broadwell and wait for Skylake processors and hopefully have some updated hardware for us next year.Note, if you decide to follow my build take a look at the different motherboard options here: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon3000/#1667 as there are a few more out since when I made my build. There’s a few options on the number of cores (4 or 8) and number of Ethernet adapters (2 or 4), including some that have 10 Gbe adapters. I do suggest getting a model with a fan instead of the one I got.
Thanks,
Ben
Whoops, that’s up to 128GB on that board, not 64GB..
Hi, these day’s its hard to get the cpu you mentioned. What other options are possible? i see that the V3 cpu’s are a bit easier to get, but do not know if they will work?
Hi Ben!
I’ve recently bought a “desktop” computer that’s like an iMac, however from the brand Medion. In this computer I got a Celeron J1900 cpu. Is the Xeon E3-1220 v2 possible to be put in to this computer and replace the Celeron J1900. Can’t find any info on this anywhere and you seem to be a knowing guy.
Cheers from Sweden!
Hi, Ludvig! I believe the J1900 is a SoC (system on chip) so it won’t be replaceable. Do you need more speed than the J1900 can provide? It’s a quad core so it’s not terrible but it’s designed for low power usage so you won’t get a lot of performance but it may be enough depending on what you’re doing.
Hey! I ended up returning the computer because it couldn’t handle photoshop and revit that good and that’s what I wanted to use it for. Thanks for the help! You’re answer helped a lot in the decision!
the Core i3 does not support ECC memory
http://ark.intel.com/products/74745/Intel-Core-i3-3250T-Processor-3M-Cache-3_00-GHz
If not mentioned before (I don’t think so), this thread is worth a look in consideration to which HW is compatible with the microserver: http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?%2Ftopic%2F5639-proliant-microserver-gen8-links%2F
Br
Frank
E3-1230 v5, can version 5 work instead of E3-1230 v2? as V2 is hard to find.
Hi, George. No, it’s a different socket. You will need V2.
Hi. What would you think about using the E3-1230 (V1), as it is also the right socket? Would the 80W utilize too much heat?
What’s your thoughts on this build over a n40L with 16GB RAM?…is it worth the upgrade?
I have 2 machines which I’m trying to consolidate into 1 as I only need it for Studying. (1 n40l & an overkill AMD 8320,32GB beast!)
was looking at installing the 1265L in a gen8 with 16GB ecc RAM. any suggestions?
Hi, Adi. Probably the main difference between the N40L and Gen8 HP Microserver is the CPU speed. I think it’s worth it to have a faster CPU but it really depends on what you’re doing. If you’re looking for a lot of power in microserver size you may want to look at doing something like this: https://b3n.org/supermicro-x10sdv-f-build-datacenter-in-a-box/
Hello,
I’m running the Gen 8 with a Xeon E3-1220 V2 and it runs fine.
Lese days the ambiant temperature was over 25 °C and the processor temperature did not exceed 42 °C.
The Gen 8 is used as both a file server and a host for Hyper(V and is currently hosting 3 VMs running W10 Pro.
Hello Ben,
I see you had no issues upgrading to e3-1230v2. I want to do the same with my ml310e server, but i am concerned will the non-FIO xeon work normally? Did you buy your 1230v2 CPU as a FIO processor kit from HP, or did you take any regular xeon CPU from retail? Thank you in advance! Cheers…
Not sure if this help but I bought a bare E3-1265Lv2 and just plugged it in. Its been working flawlessly for 2.5 years
it does help, Russ, thanks.
Hi can I combine 4gb and 8gb memory modules, server has 4gb RAM and I want to buy another 8 gb modul kingston KTH-PL316E/8G it will work in dual channel then?
I think that dual channel requires two identical modules.
This setup will work in single channel mode and is far from being an optimal setup.
Hello, thanks for your very interesting post, but you should edit your recommandation because Core I3 do not support ECC memory (which is important for ZFS which is a frequent use case for HP Microservers)
I am 99% sure the Intel ARK page said it had ECC at the time I wrote the post… page updated. Thanks for bringing that to my attention Pierre.
Talked with HP, i live in Europe, scheduled End Of Life (EOL) for HP Microserver gen8 is 2017 june 30. So probably until then there will be no info about next gen microserver. Which is very good low budget home lab server,
So interestingly, I have been running 2 x Kingston KTH-PL316E/8G sticks in my Gen8 for ~3 years with the Pentium G2020T, with that same ” DIMM X could not be authenticated as genuine HP SmartMemory” etc, and it works fine.
Yesterday I got my hands on a cheap Xeon E3-1230 v2 and installed that, and the server won’t boot past the “Checking Intel QPI/Memory” post screen with the Boot Code 0114. Googling implies that you MUST use genuine HP SmartMemory.
Given how old this post is I’m not expecting a reply, but wondering if you had to do any tricks in the BIOS (not that I can see any options) to get it to work? Additionally if anyone else is thinking of doing this upgrade, you may need to consider the cost of real HP memory as well.
Hi, James. I did not have that issue with generic memory.
Hi,
I’m using the same DIMM sticks with a Xeon 1220 V2 and they are recognized as genuine HP DIMM.
Maybe your CPU is dead.
CPU works fine with 2gb genuine HP memory.
No worries Benjamin. I tried a different pair of 8gb non-genuine sticks and it works fine, so all good!
Hi I know its late in the game but I wanted to give a BIG shout out to Benjamin Bryan for this blog I was going back and forth about what processor to upgrade my gen 8 to and after reading this blog I got the 1230 v2 and boy am I impressed! Maxed it out for 6h with turbo switched on also server is fully loaded 4 spinning rusts 1 SSD 1 PCIE Dual port gig card and Micro SD card power not a problem and CPU Temp maxed at 60c. The temp stays at 40c during normal operation and also I might add the fan speed never went above 16% during tests. Had to look over at it to make sure its still on lol, This is one serious bit of kit for the money. So thanks to Benjamin Bryan and everybody in the blog.
Thanks, Michael. Glad it’s working well for you.
Don’t trust the temp reading, it’s buggy and will always stay to 40°C whatever is the CPU real temp.
Hey Russ, thanks for the info, I was planning to buy this processor and stick it in so glad to see someone is having long term success.
Did you have to do anything special to get the new Xeon working? I bought a ‘working’ 1230v2 on ebay, but can’t get it go on either of my Gen8 Microserver’s. It tried to boot, but fan shuts off immediately and the light on the front flashing red quickly.
Looking on the iLO logs it says power failure, but it must count for something that I can get into iLO. Boots fine from the stock G1610T…
Thanks,
Brendan
Hi, Brendan. I didn’t have to do anything special, I dropped it in and it worked.
It looks like you got a bad CPU.
Can you try it with a desktop mùaintbord, just to be sure wether it works or not.
Did you check the intel marking on the chip top, just to be sure that you got a true 1230V2 chip ?
I didn’t have to do anything at all and you shouldn’t have to BIOS takes care of that automatically, Sounds like you have a faulty or fake CPU
mainboard, sorry for the typing mistake.
Hi,
I upgraded CPU to E3-1230 V2 but i have an “System Power Fault Detected” error.
Anyone have the same issue?
Regards
Looks like you got either a bad or fake CPU.
Hi all
intel Xeon E3-1225V2 3.2GHz 8M Socket LGA1155 Quad Core CPU Processor SR0PJ
i have ordered this bad boy off ebay and was trying to see if it would work in a gen 8 Micro server.
What my main issue is that it ends in 5 and might have GPU problems and the TDP rating of 77w.
anyone got it working with this processor?
Did you get this working as i have the Xeon E3-1225V2 3.2GHz from a Dell T20 server that I want to put in a Gen8?
Hey all, I’ve had a gen8 for some time. found an E3-1220 V2 I installed and works fine! looking to throw more RAM at it. ECC stuff, why doesn’t the gen8 support registered RAM? Is that CPU or Mainboard related?
Great info here! Great work!
I’ve seen the same thing. If you search for “ILO stuck at 40c CPU temp” you’ll see it’s a common theme, although some report it changing slightly, suggesting that it’s a sensor on the motherboard close to the CPU heatsink that doesn’t properly measure.
My logs suggest that it hasn’t changed in a year while every other temperature has. The ACPI Thermal Zone does however measure the CPU’s package temperature (x86_pkg_temp) . The fan speed does not appear to be locked but it might be that adjusting the cooling options in the BIOS would be necessary if you have e.g. a high-powered CPU replacement.
Here’s the thing: the Celeron doesn’t appear to really “support” it, either, looking at PCI capabilities. It seems like it’s handled by the C204 chipset’s PCH. I know what Ark says, but it’s just a database maintained by Intel, and it would be quite possible to say that “we’re only going to sell this CPU with this chipset that handles ECC”. After all, how many G1610T have you seen elsewhere?
The i5-3470T doesn’t “support” ECC either, but it works and iLO complains it’s running in Advanced ECC mode.
This page talks a little more about it, but it might need to include “T” chips generally:
https://www.itconnected.tech/blog/intel-c200-series-chipset-quirks/
See also this test program – I get a ‘3’ on the above configuration:
https://hardforum.com/threads/ecc-check-on-intel-i3-processors.1693051/
Thank you for the blog – i ended up going with the Intel Xeon E3-1260L 8M Cache 2.4 GHz SR00M (2.4Ghz – 3.3Ghz, 4 core 8 thread) processor and 16GB of ecc ram.
I noticed the large system fan was making a “clicking” noise, this has been an issue for others in various blogs i’ve read so i thought i would share my experience here to help others..
So i took apart the fan, cleaned it / re-greased and put together… noise was even worse…
Search for a replacement there were a lot of “refurbished” HP fans on ebay / aliexpress for £80+ which i didnt fancy paying so i purchased the Noctua NF-P12 redux from amazon..
Now, as the Noctua NF-P12 redux doesn’t have the HP Fan connector i had to rewire the HP connector from the original fan to this one.. it worked and booted up just fine, was ever so silent BUT cpu temps were constantly in the high 55c – 60c at idle and around 69c on full load.. the fan was able to boost upto a maximum of 1700rpm which simply wasn’t pushing enough air out…
I then purchased a generic version of the orginal fan (AFB1212SH) for around £14 on ebay, this arrived a few days later.. i rewired the HP connector once again to this fan.. expecting it to work just the same as the original however i kept getting “fan not detected” on boot and the system kept shutting down..
so, i then took apart the new AFB1212SH, pulled out the bearings and the fan head itself and replaced the original fans components wiith these ones… rewired the HP Connector back to the original fan …
plugged in everything and pressed the power button…
Click.. it switched on… posted… boosted up and then went into the OS, speed dropped to 13% and it’s been stable as a rock with CPU temps @40c on idle / 50c @ full load with no more clicking and the fan pretty silent..
so.. if anyone has the same issue with their fan being very noisy (clicking etc) just buy a AFB1212SH off ebay, take out the bearings and replace in your existing fan… job done.
Currently running 16GB of generic ECC ram.. 5VM’s on ESXI 6.7..
I know these machines are getting old, but one came up for a great price. I upgraded the RAM, then the CPU to an E3-1270 v2. That also meant I had to figure out active cooling. Trickier than I thought, but lots of help online. Here are some of images of what I had to do to get it work(in no particular order). Now? It’s a very capable machine!
https://imgur.com/a/Uxx280y
Nice, which fan model is that?
Noctua NH-L9i-17xx, Premium Low-Profile CPU Cooler for Intel LGA1700