I just ordered the HP Microserver N40L, now what?

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Hi Guys/Gals of CF,
Got myself one the HP N40L microservers this week. I am intending on creating my first home/test environment, as I want to begin studying for my 70-680 exam. Now I know I need to upgrade the ram on it to 8GB (when funds permit). Currently have two laptops which I can use to remote into the server.
In terms of software to install, which ones would you recommend I install on the N40L, what other hardware parts can I upgrade on it?
If you have one of this machine, what set up have you gone with? Any ideas.

Many thanks in advance.

 

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I have the N40L and am also doing the 70-680 so here's what ive done.

Upgraded the ram to 8GB (about £30 from ebuyer)
populated the server with disks
Installed Windows Server 2008r2
I the use hyper-v to create the virtual lab for 70-680 and can have 3 maybe 4 vm's running at any one time.
You could use various virtualisation products even those that are free, i only chose Hyper-V because i have some exposure to it at work so thought the practice would come in handy.

I also use my server as a file storage / backup solution for my other devices around the house...

Great little boxes.

 

I've also just invested in one of these little marvels. I've upgraded the RAM to 8gb and installed VMWare ESXi 5 on it running 3 VMs at the moment, 2 x Win 2008 R2 and 1 x Win7. It came with a 250gb HDD so I've not felt the need to increase that, but I've got 3 drive bays free for when I do.

Also, ESXi will boot from a USB stick which can be mounted internally so you're not wasting HDD space and resources with a Windows installation just to run VMs.

SR

 

Yeh I really wanted to use ESXI but i couldnt get my storage disks to passthrough to the virtual machines which is why i went down the hyper-v route in the end

 

Any reason why you wanted to do it that way?

 

Just the possibility of running 1 more vm really due to the low resources that esxi uses compared to server 2008r2

 

Sorry, What I should have said is why are you trying to pass the disk through to the VM, you normally just create a datastore on the ESXi host(using the available space on the HDD) and allocate space to the VM


Skip forward to 1:30

http://youtu.be/cUYtzccT4_k

 

Thanks for that info Jamin,

Think thats what i will be doing, need to order my rams, then will follow a similar set up as you.
Please which disk did you install into your little box? How far have you gone with your 70-780 exam/studies? what materials/resources you using?

 

Cheers for the info Buddy