HP ProLiant MicroServer N40L Owner's Thread *Part 4*

[Badgerstuta]

Does it need special drivers, rather than standard Mass Storage ones?

It was immediately recognised on the ex470. Didn't have to change anything

 

[TheBlueBrazil]

It was immediately recognised on the ex470. Didn't have to change anything

What OS are you running on the Microserver?

 

[Badgerstuta]

What OS are you running on the Microserver?

WHS 2011. Can't even see it when attached in explorer either

 

[biohead]

Does anything show up in Device Manager?

 

[Qactuar]

mine took 2 days to finish the RAID-5

with regards to the other question - i have created a user called hp and then my popcorn hour and mac login using that account.

I have then created a new share on WHS called popcorn and then all my films are in there.

job done

Check the date and time settings on both machines and make sure they are set up correctly. I had this issue before and the one I was trying to get to join my existing HomeGroup failed because it reset its date and time in the bios!

Times were the same, but a sync seemed to do the trick, ta!

Still not having any joy re the GPU drivers though - would welcome any thoughts here ...

 

[sirlukas]

Hi guys, this question has probably been asked a lot here, but was just wondering what is the recommended memory upgrade for the N40L at teh moment.
I will not use it as a proper server, so not fussed about the ECC, but wanted to get something half decent, and I think 8GB set will do the job for what I will use it (or do I need 16GB)?

At the moment I am running Ubuntu x64 Desktop, but not decided if this will be my final OS as I am not very lucky to get the shares working with OpenElec (keeps on asking for credentials even though there aren't any).

Would that Kingston set work OK do you think or would you recommend some other memory to go with that Server, would like to keep the cost down as I still have to buy the HDDs.

Thank you!

 

[Jones the Steam]

Access to VMs 1, 2 and 3 are via Vsphere Client, Remote Desktop or for access outside the house, Teamviewer. VM4 - I need to play with Teamviewer / Remote Access. New to Linux, so plan to learn it on here.

Did you buy Teamviewer as I thought the free version didn't install on Windows Server ?
Nice setup BTW. I'm working towards a very similar outcome myself, perhaps with FREENAS. Did you just use the default space allocation when installing the VMs ?

 

[bullseye81]

Having an issue creating a RAID1 with 2x WD Red 3TB disks. If I create the array in Ctrl-F BIOS RAID (the LD shows as Functional) then the logical disk does not appear in windows (7 x64), instead there are 2 individual 3TB disks. They are marked as Available in RAIDXpert to create an array.

If I do the opposite and create the array in RAIDXpert then the LD doesnt show in BIOS RAID, and both disks are available for raid creation.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[mrspin]

Depends if the hardware is on the VMWare Hardware Compatibility List.

Virtual Machines only see what the Hypervisor sees. Hypervisor doesn't see it - then the VM's won't see it. Hardware Passthrough doesn't work on Microserver - Option is disabled :-(

I bought the HP PCI Wi-FI Adaptor thinking i could have the Microserver upstairs out the way connecting via wi-fi. Cannot get ESXi to detect it, and hence my VM's can't see it. So currently sitting with a PCI wi-fi card installed i can't use :-( Would seem i could only use it if i was doing a bare metal install of an OS which supports the device.

Hi Retrokid,

does this also apply to USB devices with ESXI? so for example if I wanted a USB tuner to be visible to a Windows 7 VM running in ESXI, would this been seen?

Cheers.

 

[xerces8]

Having an issue creating a RAID1 with 2x WD Red 3TB disks. If I create the array in Ctrl-F BIOS RAID (the LD shows as Functional) then the logical disk does not appear in windows (7 x64), instead there are 2 individual 3TB disks. They are marked as Available in RAIDXpert to create an array.

If I do the opposite and create the array in RAIDXpert then the LD doesnt show in BIOS RAID, and both disks are available for raid creation.

I recommend the Windows RAID support over proprietary BIOS stuff.
In Disk Management (of Windows) just select "New Mirrored Volume..." instead of "New Simple Volume..." , otherwise it is the same as creating a regular partition. (set BIOS to standard mode, that is: AHCI)

 

[xerces8]

With a Gigabit Ethernet link between PC and HP you should be getting around 60 MByte/sec. (assuming the PC can source data at that speed).

If the hardware (CPU, HDD) keeps up, you can get 100 MB/s over gigabit ethernet. I get that with my MicroServer.

 

[xerces8]

You can set it up from disk manager after you've installed WHS. What disk configuration do you have ? One of the restrictions of the WHS built-in RAID volumes is they're not expandable. If you want to change the configuration at a later date you'll need to back up all the data, reconfigure the volume and then copy the data back on.



See my comment above. You'll get a single volume (drive letter), but won't be able to add additional disks to it later.

Spanned Volumes can be extended any time by adding a new disk (or freeing up space on existing ones) and the in Disk Management right click the existing volume/partition and select "Extend Volume..." then in the dialog add the new disk and click Next...
You can even start with a regular ("Simple" as Windows calls it) partition.

I just tried this ith Windows 2012 (the server counter part of Windows 8), but Spanned volumes are supported since Windows 2000 or even earlier.

 

[xerces8]

Quick question for the Linux users on here. How do you get the server to go to sleep, so that I can use wake on LAN to wake it up?

The Microserver does not support sleep. You can hibernate it (Suspend-to-disk) or power it off.
Wake-on-LAN should be able to turn it back on in both cases.

 

[psikey]

Have an N40L with the 150W PSU.

Have significantly updated it since I had it with a 2 x SATA2 card to power 2 x 2.5" Drives + slimline DVD drive, 6GB RAM and have 4 x 3TB WD RED NAS drives installed. My OS drive is a 2.5" VERTEX3 60GB SSD and the 2nd 2.5" drive is a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Hybrid drive.

The 4 x 3TB drives are purely for storage of Photos/Videos/Music.

I use Windows 8 Pro as the OS using effectively RAID10 (Win8 Storage Spaces, slow writes but fast read).

I've tended to use this purely as a Media Server with Twonky Media & torrent downloads but the family PC died over Christmas and didn't want them touching my gaming i7-3770K/GTX670 Monster. Now using a 4 Bay QNAP TS-469Pro with 4x3TB drives as my Primary Media Device and the Microserver is really the external media Backup.

Decided to make it a better all-round PC by adding a GPU so kids can do a bit of gaming.

Have read all about the various GPU options with the 5450/6450 or GT210/220/340 etc. then recently read people had installed a 6670 even though limit on PCI-E is meant to be 25W. Anyway, also saw lots of questions regarding the 7750 low profile but no one seems to have confirmed it can work so I decided to give it a try seeing as much more powerful than other options. I also tried a 6450 for comparison.

GPU comparison of on-board GPU Vs Sapphire HD 6540 512MB GDDR3 Vs Sapphire HD 7750 1GB GDDR5 Low profile

Windows 8 Benchmarks

On-board CPU 4.3; RAM 5.9; GPU 4.0; GPU Gaming 5.3; SSD 6.9; Idle Power 50w
HD 6450 CPU 4.3; RAM 6.6; GPU 4.4; GPU Gaming 6.1; SSD 6.9; Idle Power 53w
HD 7750 CPU 4.3; RAM 6.6; GPU 7.2; GPU Gaming 7.2; SSD 6.9; Idle Power 58w

All settings enabled & high during tests

Left4Dead 2

On-board 720p 7fps 1080p 3fps (50w)
HD 6450 720p 32fps 1080p 17fps (73w)
HD 7750 720p 60fps (83w) 1080p 40fps (95w)

SIMS3 Seems to be CPU limited as even though fast fps it lags even with 7750 at high settings. Task manager showing CPU often over 90%.

On-board 720p 8fps 1080p 5fps (50w)
HD 6450 720p 35fps 1080p 22fps (73w)
HD 7750 720p 55fps (83w) 1080p 55fps (95w)

So there you have it, the Microserver can work with the Saphhire HD 7750 low profile. Its really easy to install and fan hardly noticeable even when gaming. I'd say its bit too loud now for a HTPC if in a quiet living room during low sound sections of a film compared to on-board or passive cooled 6450).

Max Power draw then is 1-2w for the on-board GPU, 20w for HD 6450 and 37w for the HD 7750 during the game testing with highest peak seen at 113w during Windows Benchmarking.

Have plenty of photos I can post tomorrow if anyone interested.

PS, the Idle power is with all the drives spinning. When the drives go into standby the base level is around 40w.

 

[cjed]

Spanned Volumes can be extended any time by adding a new disk (or freeing up space on existing ones) and the in Disk Management right click the existing volume/partition and select "Extend Volume..." then in the dialog add the new disk and click Next...
You can even start with a regular ("Simple" as Windows calls it) partition.

I just tried this ith Windows 2012 (the server counter part of Windows 8), but Spanned volumes are supported since Windows 2000 or even earlier.

That may well apply to Windows 2012, but in Windows Home Server 2011 you can't extend a RAID-5 array, the "Extend Volume ..." option isn't available. Here's a screenshot showing available actions for a RAID 5 volume on WHS2011 :

 

[3point14]

How can I view what is happening with the hard drives in my N40L and if they are constantly running, how can I get them to power down a little when not in use, such as overnight.

I'm running WD Red 2TB disks.

 

[xerces8]

That may well apply to Windows 2012, but in Windows Home Server 2011 you can't extend a RAID-5 array, the "Extend Volume ..." option isn't available.

Of course not. It is available for Simple and Spanned Volumes, like I wrote but you did not read.
It is not available for other types, like Striped, Mirrored or RAID-5.

 

[archy121]

Thanks for your post !

I wish you had posted it sooner as it would have saved me pulling my hair out in trying to figure out if the system could handle a gfx card higher than 6540. The general consensus throughout most forums was that the N40L would not be able to handel anything higher than HD6450 or GT520 due to power limititations.

I was determined not to put a HD6450 as I think it's a little feeble to comfortably handel smooth playback of highest quality 3D Blu-ray ISO without getting the CPU thrashed. Also Anantech did a group test on HTPC cards & concluded HD6450 & GT520 could not be recommended as they failed in areas of video tests. The HD6570 was the champ but had a higher TDP of 44W as opposed to 27W for HD6450. After scouring the net & getting no definitive answer on compatibility I took the jump & ordered the HD6570.

Today your post has put me to peace as the ordered card has not arrived yet & i was still unsure if i did right. The HD7750 has a 10W higher TDP of 55W so im sure the HD6570 will be fine.

Can you please confirm the reported wattage values by you are for the n40l loaded with 4x3.5 HD, 1xSSD, 1x2.5HD & HD7750 ?

I have another outstanding question that I'm hoping you can help answer.

I plan to add in a SATA3 card to run a SATA3 SSD for speed gains & free up the internal ODD SATA port that it's currently taking up. As you already have a SATA card in yours can you confirm if the BIOS will allow selecting boot device from the add in SATA card ?


I need to be able to boot off the SSD drive as its my OS BOOT drive.

Have an N40L with the 150W PSU.

Have significantly updated it since I had it with a 2 x SATA2 card to power 2 x 2.5" Drives + slimline DVD drive, 6GB RAM and I have 4 x 3TB WD RED NAS drives installed. My OS drive is a 2.5" VERTEX3 60GB SSD and the 2nd 2.5" drive is a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Hybrid drive.

The 4 x 3TB drives are purely for storage of Photos/Videos/Music.

I use Windows 8 Pro as the OS using effectively RAID10 (Win8 Storage Spaces, slow writes but fast read).

I've tended to use this purely as a Media Server with Twonky Media & torrent downloads but the family PC died over Christmas and didn't want them touching my gaming i7-3770K/GTX670 Monster. Now using a 4 Bay QNAP TS-469Pro with 4x3TB drives as my Primary Media Device and the Microserver is really the external media Backup.

Decided to make it a better all-round PC by adding a GPU so kids can do a bit of gaming.

Have read all about the various GPU options with the 5450/6450 or GT210/220/340 etc. then recently read people had installed a 6670 even though limit on PCI-E is meant to be 25W. Anyway, also saw lots of questions regarding the 7750 low profile but no one seems to have confirmed it can work so I decided to give it a try seeing as much more powerful than other options. I also tried a 6450 for comparison.

GPU comparison of on-board GPV Vs Sapphire HD 6540 512MB GDDR3 Vs Sapphire HD 7750 1GB GDDR5 Low profile

Windows 8 Benchmarks

On-board CPU 4.3; RAM 5.9; GPU 4.0; GPU Gaming 5.3; SSD 6.9; Idle Power 50w
HD 6450 CPU 4.3; RAM 6.6; GPU 4.4; GPU Gaming 6.1; SSD 6.9; Idle Power 53w
HD 7750 CPU 4.3; RAM 6.6; GPU 7.2; GPU Gaming 7.2; SSD 6.9; Idle Power 58w

All settings enabled & high during tests

Left4Dead 2

On-board 720p 7fps 1080p 3fps (50w)
HD 6450 720p 32fps 1080p 17fps (73w)
HD 7750 720p 55fps (83w) 1080p 55fps (95w)

SIMS3 Seems to be CPU limited as even though fast fps it lags even with 7750 at high settings. Task manager showing CPU often over 90%.

On-board 720p 8fps 1080p 5fps (50w)
HD 6450 720p 35fps 1080p 22fps (73w)
HD 7750 720p 55fps (83w) 1080p 55fps (95w)

So there you have it, the Microserver can work with the Saphhire HD 7750 low profile. Its really easy to install and fan hardly noticeable even when gaming. I'd say its bit too loud now for a HTPC if in a quiet living room during low sound sections of a film compared to on-board or passive cooled 6450).

Max Power draw then is 1-2w for the on-board GPU, 20w for HD 6450 and 37w for the HD 7750 during the game testing with highest peak seen at 113w during Windows Benchmarking.

Have plenty of photos I can post tomorrow if anyone interested.

PS, the Idle power is with all the drives spinning. When the drives go into standby the base level is around 40w.

 

[psikey]

Peak load of 113w is with all 6 drives, slimline DVD, keyboard/mouse, USB powered speaker and the HD7750 under full load.

The 60GB SSD is my Windows 8 boot drive and is connected to my add-in SATA2 card. Just needed the drivers loading at Windows install time with the DVD on the motherboard ODD sata connector.

 

[sirlukas]

Hi guys, this question has probably been asked a lot here, but was just wondering what is the recommended memory upgrade for the N40L at teh moment.
I will not use it as a proper server, so not fussed about the ECC, but wanted to get something half decent, and I think 8GB set will do the job for what I will use it (or do I need 16GB)?

At the moment I am running Ubuntu x64 Desktop, but not decided if this will be my final OS as I am not very lucky to get the shares working with OpenElec (keeps on asking for credentials even though there aren't any).

Would that Kingston set work OK do you think or would you recommend some other memory to go with that Server, would like to keep the cost down as I still have to buy the HDDs.

Thank you!

Guys, can you help me with a preferred choice of RAM Upgrade please so I don't go wrong?
It is for NAS use for external XBMC Player and general backup.

 

[archy121]

I have added a HD6570 card & installed the latest AMD 12.10 drivers but the display on my screen is leaving borders round the edge whatever resolution the graphics card is set to.

The N40L is connected to a 1080P TV via 1080P AV Receiver & this is tested as working fine when connecting my laptop using same HDMI connection.

I'm guessing its some kind of over scan issue but the AMD Vision control center does not bring up any options for FLAT Panels - Maybe because I'm going through AV receiver which i have to to get sound for movie playback etc ?

Anyone know a fix ? Is the card faulty or the particular drivers ?


Thanks

 

[sirlukas]

Look for "Overscan" setting in the Drivers of your Graphics Card and play around with it.

 

[archy121]

Yep a registry fix done the trick in the end. No thanks AMD. I heard there drivers stunk compared to NVIDIA & i know now why.. waste of 3 hours.

There was no My Flat-Panels-overscan option coming up in AMD Vision centre.

Here's the fix for me. I PREFER to not have any AMD/ATI software installed if possible. Generally has no benefit and with the latest Win8 package, CCC is gone. Looks to be replaced with AMD Vision Engine CC, which isn't ready for prime time. Compatibility Mode also did not work as the option for XP is gone in Windows 8. This is what I did to fix the black bars.

If you have ANY AMD/ATI junkware installed, remove it and then REBOOT.

1. Open regedit, go to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video\
2. There will be various long strings here beginning with brackets
3. One of these will be for your monitor/HDTV
***To discern which is for your TV, expand each one. The one that has a subkey with "0000" and/or "0001" is for your TV.
4. Once that is found, select 0000
5. Create a new DWord value. 32 bit is fine.
6. Type this for the key: DigitalHDTVDefaultUnderscan
7. The value will default to "0". Leave that.
8. Reboot
9. Blammo. Full screen.

If that doesn't work, I would strongly suggest repeating the above steps AFTER doing a Windows 8 refresh, which removes all software added to Windows 8 but keeps your files.

I have also found that the above does not work if the following key in the same 0000 key directory is set to "0": TVEnableOverscan. If that is 0, set it to 1.

Credit to daov2a from Tomshardware forum.

 

[retrokid]

Did you buy Teamviewer as I thought the free version didn't install on Windows Server ?
Nice setup BTW. I'm working towards a very similar outcome myself, perhaps with FREENAS. Did you just use the default space allocation when installing the VMs ?

Indeed i did purchase Teamviewer. Best Remote Software i have came across. I run a small IT consultancy and use Teamviewer for my remote support on desktops and servers - so got the advantage of having a licence to which i can access the VM's on the Microserver from outside.

RE: Space Allocation. I have VWare booting off a 4GB internal USB - so once that was up and running i connected into the server via the Vsphere client and prepared the internal 250GB as a Datastore. From that, i carve off space for each of my VM's. Sitting with around 40GB unused the moment for future usage.

 

[retrokid]

Hi Retrokid,

does this also apply to USB devices with ESXI? so for example if I wanted a USB tuner to be visible to a Windows 7 VM running in ESXI, would this been seen?

Cheers.

Not tried it on Microserver yet - but don't think this will be a problem - From VM settings you add a USB Host then select USB device. Certainly in the office that's how we do it.

Adding a USB device is easier than a trying to access a PCI Card. Don't need pass through for USB i'm almost sure.