Further adventures of XenServer on the HP N40L Microserver - a follow up

If you've read my previous post on this matter you'll know how delighted I was to get the SBS2003 server running so well under XenServer. Well it's been about 300 days since I did this work. How do I know it's been 300 days? Easy - the SBS2003 server crashed for other reasons and I was compelled to reboot both - with an uptime of 281 days! Apparently it has been running flawlessly - indeed the logs from both servers would suggest this.

Backups to a NAS were set up shortly after the server was commissioned and these have been running like a freight train - for which I'm profoundly grateful. Fortunately in this instance the server simply needed a restart and it was up, running and doing it's job quite happily.

I should also note that I blew a tonne of dust and dirt out of it and the whole time the N40L was like the little train that could :-)

If you have a low usage server and you're looking for a simply solution and doing a P2V migration doesn't scare you, then this is a fine option.

I now have two N40L's at home - one running FreeNAS and the other running Mint - both are running very well. I note that the price for them has gone up to $300 from eBay now....

Adventures with my new HP N40L Microserver

I took delivery today of my brand new HP N40L Microserver. I plan to use it to replace my existing whitebox server, Netgear Stora and add to my network at home. The idea is to install Citrix XenServer on this little box, then virtual guests running Ubuntu 10.04LTS, Windows Server (of some variety - 2008R2 or maybe Windows Home Server) and if required FreeNAS or another *BSD product (for fun).

The default N40L comes with 2GB of RAM, 250GB HDD and a 1.5GHz processor. I've updated the RAM to 8GB of RAM and I'll put a couple of 2TB HDDs in and probably 2 1TB HDDs disks as well.   The idea is then to set up two RAID arrays - one for the install of operating systems and associated applications, one as a storage pool for data (hopefully 2TB will be enough initially). I'll look into using 4 x 2TB disks in RAID10 and see what happens. Here we go!