Further adventures of XenServer on the HP N40L Microserver

We all know my delight in using the excellent N40L for all sorts of things. Recently a client of mine had issues with their Dell server - a server that had cost them over $20,000 5 years ago. It runs Windows SBS2003 and does a bit of file serving and not much else. I've migrated them to Google Apps for mail/calendar etc so they aren't even using Exchange. Unfortunately this client has fallen on hard times with the GFC so when this huge and expensive server of theirs began to fail, they asked for a low cost option to save their data and have a minimum of downtime.

I had just purchased an N40L for my test lab and as their disks continued to decline was able to get a complete image of the system. What surprised me was they had a 5 year old server with 7 year old disks in it! What the? I acquired some Western Digital Red Drives and installed them and 8 GB of RAM into the N40L. My initial idea was to use Acronis or similar to do a Universal Restore of the data to the N40L, update drivers and software and put the machine back in. After all, this server lives in their main office space - you can imagine what a Dell 2950 Tower server sounds like in your ear day after day.

Unfortunately my imaging project was unsuccessful. Windows SBS 2003 did not want to play the game and so I was left pondering my next move. I could buy a new copy of Windows SBS (2011 in this case) and migrate data across, a time consuming effort and with the Microsoft Tax on Australian software not an inexpensive option. I could do something dodgy and get a.... no no no. Life is too short to pirate software. At any rate, the option of a physical to virtual migration was available. So I installed XenServer 6 on the HP N40L. I installed to one disk and set up the hardware (really software) RAID via the BIOS. I'm not sure if this mirroring will actually work, because XenServer only sees the two disks. I reasoned that if software RAID is running and I install to one disk, then the BIOS level RAID should mirror both the disks.... when I have the leisure I'll test this. At any rate, 15 minutes later XenServer was up and running and ready for stuff to happen.

Because I was in a hurry I slammed a copy of XenCentre on my notebook, connected to the server and configured a Windows 2003 SBS guest with roughly the same parameters (disk, RAM etc) as the original server, imaged it across as if it was a physical server and held my breath. The server booted in the virtual environment successfully! It was running like a bucket of pus, but after installing the Xen drivers it was running better than the previous version - this made my clients very happy. I configured an external USB drive to act as the back up device and kicked a backup off. It failed and has continued to fail - there seems to be some odd conflict with the device.... at any rate, the server is running and now I need to put a small NAS in for backup purposes - one which I will mirror to an offsite location.

So for a relatively short amount of downtime and much less than a new, full sized server they are operational. When it's time for a proper new server, I'll set it up another XenServer - using hardware RAID this time (which will work) and simply migrate. The server isn't forward facing and the firewall allows only file serving with all other services disabled or firewalled off. It makes for minimal disruption for the client and once I manage to convince them to migrate to FreeBSD or GNU/Linux for their file serving the basic platform will be ready to go - I won't even need to buy another server, simply configure an additional VM and away we go.

HP N40L and FreeNAS 8.3.0

My existing HP N40L Microserver is running out of disk space. 2 TB is not enough it turns out. So I thought why not add another N40L to my network? After all, it's been a success with my existing one thus far.... So on to eBay I went, and I found an Australian company selling them for $209 delivered! I'm amazed these are so cheap - after all even low end PCs are more than this. So I ordered one up and it arrived three days later. I put a couple of 2 TB disks into the box, an 8 GB RAM DIMM and an 8 GB usb drive. Half an hour later I had FreeNAS 8.3.0 installed and a 2 TB array set up.

With an NFS share I can access the 2 TB array from my media PC and it all runs brilliantly. I've got space to add in two extra drives, and once I get two more disks I'll install them - running two 2TB mirrors and sharing out data easily. The N40L runs very quietly and efficiently and even running two of them is very quiet in the lounge room. I've used Western Digital Green Disks from 2 TB external USB drives. For $109 each plus the $209 for the N40L means that for $436 I've got a reasonable little NAS here. Another $218 and I've got a 4 TB NAS! It's stable and runs brilliantly. FreeNAS is an excellent platform for this, easy to upgrade and very stable with a wide range of network protocols available for connection to it. I'd heartily suggest using a server like this for a backup server or simple data storage. Add a couple of extra gigabit ethernet ports via the PCI Express card slots and then LAGG them together for greater through put and this simple and inexpensive NAS has even more applications in the business arena. I would strongly recommend 8 GB or more of RAM so pre-caching can be effected - this will improve data delivery.

As I type this I note an update for FreeNAS has become available so I'll grab that and install it!

FreeNAS details here: http://www.freenas.org

HP N40L Microserver details can be found here - HP N40L Microserver (URL truncated because it's awful)

Further adventures with the HP N40L and Dragonfly BSD

Since my last post, I've tried a bunch of different things with this box. These include:

• Xenserver with the following virtual machines:
• Ubuntu Server
• Windows Home Server 2011
• FreeNAS
• DragonflyBSD
• Ubuntu Server
• Linux Mint 13

Having the 2TB mirror has caused many of the problems. FreeNAS simply crashed and used 100% of CPU the as soon as I tried to copy a file. Dragonfly wouldn't install. Ubuntu took 4 days to build a software RAID and then when we had a power failure, the RAID failed to build again. There was a lot of frustration and perhaps a cranky swear word or two.

Eventually I decided to follow this route:

• Installed Linux Mint 13 on the box, set up a software RAID for the large disks, and left the other disks simply as an install disk and an archive disk. 
• moved all the data from my Netgear Stora to the new server
• I've deployed it to replace my server and my media PC, allowing me to ditch two PCs, one UPS and the Stora.

Yes I'm going a bit greener :-) Thus far it's going quite well. I've managed to also build up a Dragonfly BSD backup server as well.

I took my old server and put the disks from my Stora and from an external USB drive that had a failed power converter. With 3 x 2 TB Disks and a 1 TB disk in the system I wanted a way to effectively use all that disk space. It's not for live data, just for periodic backups. The HAMMER file system is awesome for this because there is no fsck on boot - it's live and happening straight away. Dragonfly is also very lightweight and runs well on the system I've got. The HAMMER filesystem has a lot going for it too - I was able to add the three disks into a single filesystem of 5.5TB and it does the normal snapshots built into HAMMER. The set up and the speed it created the filesystems with was excellent. I had one small issue with my USB DVD drive during the installation which caused the whole thing to fall in a heap but once I used a USB drive the installation went quickly and smoothly.

Adventures with XenServer on the N40L Microserver

Since my last post (in amongst family and work and stuff) I've been playing with Xenserver and the N40L Microserver. Here's how it's gone down:

The initial install went quite well, except I had configured two mirrored RAID arrays - one with 2 x 1TB disks, the other with 2 x 2TB disks. Xenserver saw neither of them. So I removed both arrays, set the SATA controller back to AHCI and went from there.

After a quick re-install, I had an initial local storage of 1TB. Following this I added three more local storage devices and re-thought how I was going to do the installation of my VMs. Following the exceptional directions on creating an Ubuntu 12.04LTS server on Xenserver from http://www.invalidlogic.com/2012/05/01/deploying-ubuntu-12-04-on-xenserver-made-easy I created a 12.04 Ubuntu virtual server - all went very well. In accordance with my plan, I also created a Windows Home Server 2011 using the Windows 2008R2 template.

The WHS2011 server was so slow to install, setup and run. I had assigned it 2 CPU's, 4GB of RAM and it took at least three hours longer than the Ubuntu server to install and get going. I must note that the template from invalidlogic.com was superb and perhaps that has spoilt me a bit :-)

I also set up a FreeNAS - installed to one of the 1TB drives with 2 x 2TB virtual disks presented to it. The FreeNAS server installed quite fast and everything looked good. I set up NFS and CIFS shares and thought it was all going well. Unfortunately, as soon as I started to copy data across to the FreeNAS it's CPU usage hit 100% (as did the host's CPU). This was clearly a failure and wasn't going to work.

Undeterred, I thought about Dragonfly BSD and the excellent HAMMER file system - let's give that a crack I thought. The initial boot of the disk failed.... So FreeNAS and Dragonfly aren't going to play the game - new plan! More about this tomorrow :-)