HP ProLiant MicroServer

While at the MVP Summit those of us in the SBS and WHS specialities received a gift from HP. That gift was an HP ProLiant MicroServer with a 250GB hard disk and 1GB of RAM.

Once we had a bit of time we pulled it apart to see what was up and also to install RAM:

The server board sits on a tray that is held in place by the two blue thumb screws.

Once we slid the tray out we had full access to the RAM slots along with the two PCI-E slots that allow us to install a half height half length add-in card.

We installed the two 4GB ECC DRAM DIMMs to bring the server’s RAM up to 8GB because the 1GB just was not cutting it with Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard.

Note that there is no hot swap backplane in this unit so any hard disk maintenance needs to be accomplished with the server offline.

When installing an optical drive or an addition set of hard disks the mounting screws are located in the front door panel.

• Optical drive screws and hex key tool.

• Hard disk drive mounting screws located in the front door panel.

This unit is _really_ quiet. It is quite suited to sitting on or under a desk somewhere in a small office with no one ever knowing that it even exists.

We are inclined to see the MicroServer as a the platform of choice for the small 5-10 seat office with the Microsoft Windows Small Business Server Essentials 2011 operating system.

Or, the MicroServer makes a great standalone DC for those clients that we are setting up with a simple two node DAS based Hyper-V cluster.

One thing to be mindful of when it comes to the out of the box configuration is that the on board software RAID setup is quite limited for bandwidth. So, a fairly active engineering or architectural firm that is moving a lot of data from a single point may not benefit from this box without an add-in RAID controller.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer