HP Microserver

[janobi]

I've got one of these think its Gen7. I bought it sometime ago, and never got around to setting it up etc.

I've opened it today and there are no HDD's, I believe when I bought it should've had one, but that's another story.

It takes SATA drives, with 4x possible.

Im looking at setting it up as a plex server, installing ubuntu on it first, then installing plex.

Couple of questions I have;

Anyone got any experience in doing this? Can you link me to some articles, or offer advice?

What HDD's are you using? -

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I've read the BIOS needs updating, is this correct? Experiences/links?

Should I install a SSD for the OS, and lose a bay of the server?

Any other advice, tips, tricks are more than welcomed.

Thanks

 

[gadgethome]

I started doing this at home using a NAS drive but ended up going cloud based and it was much faster for me.
I'm using PlexGuide.com to manage my downloads and plex server.

I think you can use plexguide to a local HDD as well.

 

[turner brown]

cheap media drives from a 2 tb sky box sourced off gumtree for £10 each

 

[calisto]

Had one of these for a few years now, got 10tb of space. I have got Freenas on it, I mostly use it with XBMC to different machines arround my house. Did set Plex up on it using plugin on Freenas.

 

[janobi]

cheap media drives from a 2 tb sky box sourced off gumtree for £10 each

Cant find any of those mate

I've bought 2x 2TB drives off ebuyer now. Should start me off.

 

[turner brown]

come up quiet often so keep an eye out for cheap storage

 

[Grimeire]

I would put esxi on the server and then create a freenas vm and use jails for plex. It allows you to keep thing modular and means you dont have to rebuilt the whole VM if something happens to it.

I have the same setup as above and it comes in handy as i can easily spin up vms in ESXI and keep my Nas, Plex automation apps separate. Its been rock solid for years so can't complain.

Also always update the BIOS you would be surprised the funky issues you may encounter on out dated BIOSs.

 

[janobi]

I would put esxi on the server and then create a freenas vm and use jails for plex. It allows you to keep thing modular and means you dont have to rebuilt the whole VM if something happens to it.

I have the same setup as above and it comes in handy as i can easily spin up vms in ESXI and keep my Nas, Plex automation apps separate. Its been rock solid for years so can't complain.

Also always update the BIOS you would be surprised the funky issues you may encounter on out dated BIOSs.

Sounds good, only issue would be it only has 8Gb of ram atm, not sure it would run ESXi very well.

 

[Spectre]

Sounds good, only issue would be it only has 8Gb of ram atm, not sure it would run ESXi very well.

I've also wondered about virtualisation on N54Ls, @Grimeire reckons his is running fine but I asked someone else about it and they said not to bother.

Mine has 10GB RAM (more than they say will work, I thing it might have to be Kingston ECC, not sure on what they base the 8GB limit).

Very low load on mine (I have two), one is IPTV and proxy tunnel, soon to be more file storage soon, when I get round to it... Other one is offline file storage.

 

[Grimeire]

Sounds good, only issue would be it only has 8Gb of ram atm, not sure it would run ESXi very well.

I have run ESXI with less ram than that as a VM in Fusion and workstation on a Macbook and Windows laptop before and it worked fine with a few VMs. Put freenas or Nas OSs directly on the machine will work fine too but for me FreeBSD Bhyve hypervisor has too many limitations and was creating hours of extra work for me every week. If you are not using VMs or are only doing basic virtualisation then just natively install Freenas without ESXI.

I create and delete VMs on a weekly basis and doing that with Bhyve was a nightmare and due to at the time it not supporting(it may support them now) some Kernels it was not possible to run some OSs on Bhyve. You will also fine that many VMs online are only available on Vmware or Hyper-V format which are not completable with Bhyve.

Remember ESXI is a bare metal Hyper-V it requires far less resources than workstation, Fusion etc to run as it does not have a host OS sucking up all the resources.

I've also wondered about virtualisation on N54Ls, @Grimeire reckons his is running fine but I asked someone else about it and they said not to bother.

Mine has 10GB RAM (more than they say will work, I thing it might have to be Kingston ECC, not sure on what they base the 8GB limit).

Very low load on mine (I have two), one is IPTV and proxy tunnel, soon to be more file storage soon, when I get round to it... Other one is offline file storage.

I dont have a HP microservers but i know a few users on the freenas forum have used them for ESXI and virtualised freenas on them. Did the person who told you not to boder give you a reason as I am not aware of any issues. I have yet to come across hardware that ESXI had issues with. I have run it on a number of laptops, desktop machines and racked servers all without issues.

You dont need ECC ram for ESXI but it is recommended for Freenas as the RAID is done in software. Not using ECC ram may(but unlikely) result in some corrupt data. All production servers are suppose to use ECC ram and as Freenas is for production that is why ECC ram is recommended. The main downside with ECC is that it is slow. You should have no issues using non ECC ram.

 

[janobi]

There's a specific ESXi image you can run, it's on another forum. I literally just want to use it as a media centre, and figured installing plex would be the best way.

@Grimeire - Do I need to setup linux with LVM? I've got about 6TB of HDD, as I think they sent me 3TB drives instead of 2TB drives.

 

[Grimeire]

There's a specific ESXi image you can run, it's on another forum. I literally just want to use it as a media centre, and figured installing plex would be the best way.

@Grimeire - Do I need to setup linux with LVM? I've got about 6TB of HDD, as I think they sent me 3TB drives instead of 2TB drives.

LVM is not needed but probably a good idea to use in case you want to make change to the OS storage partitions later.

If you are just using it as a media server then just install a Linux distribution you like and install Plex on that.

If it was me i would install the OS on another hdd/ssd/USB-drive and have the storage drives separate. That way you have some redancy if something goes wrong and easily change/upgrade the OS Plex is running on without having to worry about the data. Not sure if the server you have has RAID capabilities but if it does I would put the 2 * 3TB drives you got in raid 1 so you have redundancy. You will lose a drive if you do that but wont have to worry about loosing data if a drive fails. Freenas has software raid so is an option if your server does not have raid.

Alternatively you can just mount the 2 drives on the Linux OS and use one for TV and the other for Films. If 1 drive ever fails you will only lose 1 category.

 

[Spectre]

LVM is not needed but probably a good idea to use in case you want to make change to the OS storage partitions later.

If you are just using it as a media server then just install a Linux distribution you like and install Plex on that.

If it was me i would install the OS on another hdd/ssd/USB-drive and have the storage drives separate. That way you have some redancy if something goes wrong and easily change/upgrade the OS Plex is running on without having to worry about the data. Not sure if the server you have has RAID capabilities but if it does I would put the 2 * 3TB drives you got in raid 1 so you have redundancy. You will lose a drive if you do that but wont have to worry about loosing data if a drive fails. Freenas has software raid so is an option if your server does not have raid.

Alternatively you can just mount the 2 drives on the Linux OS and use one for TV and the other for Films. If 1 drive ever fails you will only lose 1 category.

I put mine into RAID1 as they only have a 0 or 1 option, unless you go purely software-based. Someone I know put four HDDs in his and uses unRAID booting from the internal USB. Took about 30 hours to build the initial array.

There are limits on what size volume some OS can boot from, isn't there? I think I'll keep the OS on a separate drive too, images on another machine as I can't back up large arrays.

 

[joeblaze]

Had one of these for a few years now, got 10tb of space. I have got Freenas on it, I mostly use it with XBMC to different machines arround my house. Did set Plex up on it using plugin on Freenas.

i only have a 650gb hard drive for saving movies etc, its only half full and ill never watch half. its just in case the net knocks off again, i probably never had 10tb worth of files yet in my using computers. i dont know what half the stuff wrote here means id have to google but i like reading it anyway

 

[Grimeire]

I put mine into RAID1 as they only have a 0 or 1 option, unless you go purely software-based. Someone I know put four HDDs in his and uses unRAID booting from the internal USB. Took about 30 hours to build the initial array.

There are limits on what size volume some OS can boot from, isn't there? I think I'll keep the OS on a separate drive too, images on another machine as I can't back up large arrays.

unRaid is a very similar to Freenas. Never heard of a ZFS pool taking that long to build before. Mine take just a few minutes.

Only limit to a volume a OS can boot from is that it is big enough to install the OS on in the first place. I have a tonne of bootable OSs on USBs that are only barely big enough to hold the OS and Most of the OS volumes in AWS instances are barely big enough to take the OS install.

 

[janobi]

LVM is not needed but probably a good idea to use in case you want to make change to the OS storage partitions later.

If you are just using it as a media server then just install a Linux distribution you like and install Plex on that.

If it was me i would install the OS on another hdd/ssd/USB-drive and have the storage drives separate. That way you have some redancy if something goes wrong and easily change/upgrade the OS Plex is running on without having to worry about the data. Not sure if the server you have has RAID capabilities but if it does I would put the 2 * 3TB drives you got in raid 1 so you have redundancy. You will lose a drive if you do that but wont have to worry about loosing data if a drive fails. Freenas has software raid so is an option if your server does not have raid.

Alternatively you can just mount the 2 drives on the Linux OS and use one for TV and the other for Films. If 1 drive ever fails you will only lose 1 category.

Yeah that's pretty much what I am doing. Im not worried about losing stuff, as i'll just fill it back up again. It's mainly going to have kids films on it anyways.