How to configure my Hp n40l

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by chaosengine, Feb 1, 2013.

  1. chaosengine

    chaosengine New Member

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    Hi there,
    I have an HP n40l Microserver. It has 8gb of ram, standard 250gb hdd, and 2x 1tb drives.

    At the moment I use it with whs 2011 for media storage only. It 'serves' my movies and music to a Dune hd media over my network.

    This is such a waste! - i originally got the n40l to use as a learning machine, but never got around to it. Now it's the new year, im looking to get my bum in gear and finally get some certifications.

    How can I setup the n40l to help me learn for some certs? - I would still like to use some of the hard drive space for movies etc as I cant afford to buy another NAS for purely media. This machine will have to be both.


    Shall I install esxi or proxmox and run a bunch of VMs.? Will i need to add another Nic? - Also, how can I still share out my media to the TV via Dune and use the server as a testlab?

    many thanks for the ideas I appreciate the input! - right now, i am formatting the 2xtb discs in prep for a re-jig :)
     
  2. SimonD
    Honorary Member

    SimonD Terabyte Poster

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    You already said it yourself, use a virtualisation platform and turn it into a host with hosted VM's on it.

    My personal preference would be ESXi but you could use something else.

    I would probably look at getting an additional NIC on board (half height I think you need) and seperate out your lab and media serving onto different subnets.

    I would probably also invest in a copy of Acronis True Image and take a copy of your WHS server before doing anything else, failing that you could see about running VMware Converter and importing the WHS server into a copy of Workstation 9 until you have your host up and running.
     
    Last edited: Feb 2, 2013
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  3. dales

    dales Terabyte Poster

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    AFAIK proxmox is a mail gateway app so not sure what you would want to do with that. You'll need to think about how your media is stored currently on the server. Is it all on a second physical disk that you can take out of the box for safety. Personally I would stick esxi in the server and then recreated your WHS server as a vm within esxi. You wont really need an extra nic for Microsoft certs, but if you wanted to make it complicated your could create internal only switches between the vm's without needing any additional nics.

    The main hurdle you will have is how you ensure your movies and music are protected when you blow away the WHS install, maybe you can copy them all to another pc temporarily whilst you put esxi in the n40 and then rebuild WHS.

    :Edit Pah beaten too it!
     
    Last edited: Feb 2, 2013
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