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.

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