HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 FreeNAS project commencement!

So I ended up buying one of these last night on a whim. After hearing my instructor and uncle rave about these things a while ago, I saw a good deal on eBay that once again was one of those rare things that are great to snap up.

It was going for $290 but thanks to eBay they had a 10% off so I paid around $260 for a new(or so the sale claims) Gen8 G1610T HP Microserver and to top it off it had free postage! The guy even messaged me after informing me of when he would be posting the item out! I am hopeful that I won't get bitten from this deal, but I feel mostly safe dealing though eBay + pay-pal. Its reasonably safe but everything has its risks and I’ve only ever gotten stung once (by a generic Chinese seller none the less) who sold fake micro SD cards. I’ve learnt my lesson with the eBay sellers of SD cards, but that is for another day.

Why a HP microserver when I already have a powerhouse of a server you ask? Well, I’ve been reading up on FreeNAS and NAS solutions and the ZFS file system has me interested. I’ve never done anything with BSD or ZFS and thought it might be a good chance to learn a bit about it by building myself a new NAS. I’d also like to move my pi-hole VM from my server to something that sips power when compared to a server. Another thing about the FreeNAS that intrigued me was the whole jails system. It looks like a cool way to organise my project VM’s into a much more manageable container.

Also, the huge advantage of the gen8 microserver is that its CPU is in a standard 1155 socket and can be upgraded to a low powered 4core 45w hyper-threaded Xeon, so that is an option down the track if the CPU included (2 core G1610T) is no longer adequate. Also not to mention the server has both an internal USB type a connector it also has an internal micro sd card reader, so hopefully I can have FreeNAS run off the USB and then use the micro sd card slot as a swap drive(not that I would ever need it).

Currently, I run a WD sharespace (all the way back from 2008 running on WD green drives, the fact they are still alive to this day is amazing) and getting read-write speeds of 20/15 is a fair bit disappointing considering I’ve got access to a gigabit network and managed switches. I'll make a post about the sharespace a bit later and how I got it to work with ESXi.

Original Post

Comments

OS solutions for my Gen8 NAS Part 1

Here is that post that I talked about, so in it ill be having a look at Open Media Vault and Nas4Free! The system I am testing on is an Intel sg2600gz, a pair of Xeon E5-2650 @ 2.0GHz with 32gig rddims @1600 and raid 1 10k 6gig SAS drives. I know the SAS drives will bottleneck the system so any performance tests are going to be a little lacklustre considering they are also running a few other OS on them. To test the transfer speed I will copy a single 20 gig VMDK file FROM an SSD to ensure the source is not the bottleneck. VM’s are running on ESXi-6.5.0-4564106. Open Media Vault Ver used: 3.0.86 vCPU’s=2 Ram=2gig 5 16 virtual disks (thin) The install process was super easy, just like installing a copy of Debian, once that was all done when to go check out the web UI was it was incredibly clean and responsive! The storage page was layout was simple and easy to understand however I tried to change some settings other than the default raid ones but I found myself unable to d...

I broke my vCenter Server

So I was updating my home network now that I have a separate server to handle the pi-hole and DHCP/DNS requests, I decided to fix my VMWare setup. I was using IP addresses because I did not have a proper DNS setup and it caused all sorts of issues (i was running a pi-hole VM inside ESXi off my server), now that all that has been updated and sorted, ESXi was all happy and I could use its name in the web browser! However after updating my vCenter IP, I have run into the Error 503 page, after a quick google, the internet said I should check if the vSphere client service is running! I went to the appliance page and that was running, so I enabled SSH and BASH then SSH into the appliance to check of the service was running. service vSphere-client status While I was in the shell, the internet said I should check the HOSTS file if the IP is correct and matches, turnout it does not match… vi /etc/hosts Using VI I changed the IP to match the one on the appliance page then stopped a...

MicroServer FreeNAS project Update! Part 3

So I've sat down and done a bit of research on some of the NAS like operating systems around. Originally Freenas Corral is what got me so interested in building my own. I’ve had a look today and iX have dropped Corral completely and have no intention of updating it. I thought the whole UI change was quite nice and its a shame to see all that effort gone to waste. Freenas 11.0 U3 is available right now however I’ve been using it in a VM and I can't say I like it over corral. Now I acknowledge that I don’t yet understand the key differences between corral and 11.0 but from a fresh set of eye and around 2 – 3 playing around with both of them corral felt so much more easy to achieve what I wanted. So as a result of this I’ve decided to have a bit of a poke around until FreeNAS 11.1 is out (hopefully with native docker support) and see what other systems have to offer! The list I have compiled is related to what interested me enough to download an ISO and have a play in ESXi t...

Quad8

Search This Blog