My current media pc has died of death and beyond economic repair so was thinking of a Microserver to replace my current Dual Core 2.8/8GB RAM Fileserver so I can use that as my replacement media pc but then I've read through some older threads and have seen a few of you mention you are installing ESX on them & it got me thinking if this could also replace my DL385 G1.

I'm currently running ESXi4 on my DL385 G1 with 4 virtual servers x1 Exchange2003 backend /x1 Exchange 2003 FrontEnd + Swmbo's Website (DMZ)/ x1 Email filter / x1 junk (download box/media conversion) & space for a couple of Linux/Solaris test boxes & thinking I could migrate this little lot across to the Microserver and power off the older DL385.

For my build I'm thinking

* N40L - 8GB RAM

* x4 2GB Sata Drives

* x1 E-Sata drive enclosure with x3 1GB disks for OS/Data Backups

Also contenplating a HP410 Raid Card too, for a little extra disk I/O performance and the ability to use RAID5

So, How are they performing a few months on? What limitations have you come accross with ESXi and the Microserver?

or do I say 'sod it' and just buy a new media pc and leave my server setup alone!

Matthew

I've a couple of the older microservers (N36L) for nearly 2 years and they're great value for money (especially with the cashback). I bought them to study for VCP4, they ran ESXi 4.1 fine and I haven't had any problems with 5.0 or 5.1 either.

It's mentioned on a couple of forums that you can run 16GB RAM as opposed to the HP supported 8GB if you buy the right dimms.

You'll save a fair few quid on your electricit bill moving from that G1 too.

They are cracking lil machines.. Not really powerful CPU beasts but not too shabby.

As said above the n40 will take 16gb with the right memory.

You would also need to flash the hacked bios to unlock the full speed optical drive sata port and enable multiple drive support on esata.

They even have an internal USB port for booting esxi off

Only note is esx doesn't support the faux-raid that the machine has, so as you mentioned you would need the raid card if you wanted more I/o - although it pushes the cost up close to ml110 territory

Depending how much vm data you actually have I'd strongly reccomend a SSd in there for the hot VMs. Again this could be run from the spare onboard sata if you did get the 410i

I'm not too fussed about multiple drive support from the esata (at the moment) as I have Wardy's old Storage Array that has a built in Raid Controller and presents my disks as 1 large volume & is currently my backup array

My big concern is I/O through put of the disk array, hence looking at the P410 Array Controller, I used to use an Adaptec 3405 in another ESXi server last year and it was fantastic and offered a great improvement over the 2410SA Controller that it replaced.

My VM's aren't that CPU hungry (apart from during boot up) & I do need to thin them out a little so could move the Junk box to my desktop pc and could install the Mail filter on my front end exchange box and remove that old VM leaving me with approx 50gb of VM's

to be honest I think the I/O of the N36L is a little poor. In hindsight I should have got the P410 RAID controller, but you live and learn.

If youre not doing any enduring disk activity, I think youll be ok. Mine is a DLNA server (one of two) for my house and it hasn't missed a beat. It also has a torrent client installed (for legal downloading of course) which pushes up the disk usage.

As already mentioned, the only downside of the built in controller is the lack of hardware RAID. you need the windows driver in there to support it. and AFAIK it doesn't do RAID 5.

and AFAIK it doesn't do RAID 5.

You are correct, they only support raid1.

Have just ordered my N40L with 8GB RAM.. No disks for now as I have a few old 500gb sata disks that I plan to use todo some quick testing of OS's and ESX before I decide 100% what I'm going todo with this box, turn it into my ESX server + file server or just run it as a fileserver.

if youre going to run only 1 server, don't bother with ESX. it will have overheads that are pointless for 1 VM. unless of course you want to migrate the machine to other hardware.....

You could always install ESXi to a usb stick, install Nexenta CE as a VM and use ZFS for disk resilience - just create the vmdks you present to the VM on separate VMFS volumes. You could even pass iSCSI LUNs back to ESXi as a datastore and run other VMs on it - that way you can have your cake and eat it - multiple VMs on one microserver with the benefits of ZFS:

http://www.nexentastor.org/projects/site/wiki/CommunityEdition