Tuesday, 25 June 2013

HP MicroServer N54L




Just bought one of these tiny servers at work and am really impressed with it!

I have listed below the components I have put into the server:

16Gb (2 x 8Gb) 1333MHz DDR3 Non-ECC CL9 DIMM Memory (Kingston KVR13N9K2/16)

HP P410/256MB RAID Controller

4 x WD Red 1TB 3.5" SATA (In RAID 5) 2.7Gb usable

1 x StarTech.com 5.25in Trayless Hot Swap Mobile Rack for 3.5in Hard Drive

re purposed the 250Gb hard disk that was supplied with the server in a trayless hot swap rack that fits in the 5.25" optical drive bay. This is the boot disk for the server.

The existing cable that connects the back plate on the drive bays in the server can be disconnected from the internal RAID controller and connected to the HP P410.


I have installed ESXi 5.1 onto the boot disk and will be running 2 virtual servers on it (both Centos 6 web servers).

The processor is about the same spec as a few G5 ML115 servers I have been hosting the same sites on so it should be fine.  

The plus side is that this server is now fully hardware RAID5 and takes up a fraction of the space/power that the older servers did.

I can see me getting more of these servers set up at work and have been looking into having one at home as an offsite backup for work (loaded with larger hard disks though).