HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus Owners Club

Since many of us will be looking to upgrade to the HPE Microserver Gen10 Plus in coming months, lets start a dedicated discussion here.

Official HPE link:
https://buy.hpe.com/au/en/servers/p...-proliant-microserver-gen10-plus/p/1012241014

 

Thanks for that, mate!

So I'll get started with a few questions:

I'm running unRAID on a Gen8 with a E3-1265L-V2 CPU and my main reason for the upgrade consideration is that I'm running a stock cpu heatsink and during summer I can't really encode or do anything that would bring the temp up too much or it could easily hit the 90 Celsius+. Today, with a room temp of 17, it's hitting 70 Celsius, so yeah...

On that note, I'm running 4 HDDs for my main storage array for slow data and 2 SSDs running in Cache mode. The Gen8 allows me to use the free spots on the top and sides to add additional SSDs as long as I have an extra controller, and I do.
The Gen10 plus, on the other hand, is so tight and small that the only option would be to ditch the 2 SSDs and get a QNAP M2 PCI Express expansion card instead, or am I wrong?

Given the above, I'm a bit concerned about the compatibility and longevity of the solution, seeing as these pesky M2 drives seem to get extremely hot, even with a heatsink and active fan on that card.

Anyone with similar experiences? Have you got an idea on where we could store those SSDs, if we were to plug a 9207 expansion card (running on my Gen8 happily) or if you'd recommend using that PCI Ex M2 expansion card for 2 M2 NVME devices?

Further, if the above doesn't work, are there any suitable alternatives to this server on the same price range for similar performance (although not having iLO could be a dealbreaker for me)?

Thanks!

 

I 3D printed a mount for a laptop fan, helped with my temps a fair bit.

 

I happen to also have a 3d printer. Can you share the link to the thingiverse file you've used?
Also, what fan did you end up using? (size 4x4?)

Thanks!

 

No idea about fan size, it was quite thick though because it was from an older laptop.

I'll have to pull up the STL as it was something I modelled myself and it looks like I never uploaded to thingiverse.

 

Even though this is Gen 8 discussion, I have 2 Gen 8 units, one of them is sat in a wall mounted cabinet in my non-insulated garage (Melbourne). During short summers, on a couple of occasions, the server had auto shutdown itself when temperature rose. I had opened the front glass door, and it never happened again. My 2x Seagate 16TB Exos temperatures were in mid 50s on the hot days. For comparison, today the Seagate Exos HDD temperatures are 38'C (cabinet door is still open).

I also have E3-1265v2 CPU with 16 GB memory, running Unraid 6.9.2. So not sure why your server is running so hot. May be, pull it apart to clean any dust buildup etc ?

 

West Sydney is the answer
I'm not always keeping the AC on for the whole house to save on power costs, so the area where the little server lives gets pretty warm, and when transcoding with all cores in full, it's getting to 70.
The area inside the server is clean as a whistle as I just installed unraid and had to open to change the USB drive and took the time to do a general inspection, even removing the old thermal paste and replacing it with a fresh ARCTIC MX-4 I just bought, so yeah.

PS: I haven't linked an image in a forum in a long, long time, so hopefully this works.



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I went from a Gen8 with a E3-1265L-V2 to a Gen10 plus.
You'd be surprised how much grunt the little default Intel Pentium gold 2 core cpu has. It's near equal to the E3-1265L-V2.
I chucked an i7-9700F CPU in mine now and it's a beast.

Only universal downside with these microservers and plex trancoding is you don't get access to intel hardware transcoding.
As the microservers have their own matrox onboard gpu...intel quicksync is locked out.

 

Don't you lose ECC capability with the i7 as well? That is quite critical to me. And it sucks that we can't use quicksync. If only there was a way to disable the matrox one and go with the CPU GPU, that would be awesome, but such is life...

Thanks!

 

Yep lost ECC capability. To be perfectly honest I've never had a situation/bluescreen/issue that I found would have been prevented by using ECC.
I really don't see the point for my use case...it's just a nas and plex server. I'm not running a mission critical finance transaction system.

The intel quicksync thing will be a dealbreaker for many wanting to use it as a Plex box. Had I known beforehand I likely would have built a nas from components instead.
I still like the package for how tiny it is though. I will be taking it to LANS about 5-10times per year and it fits in a shopping bag.


EDITL: More info for my ECC reasoning.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/c..._feel_the_improvements_of_ecc_memory/dm53ic6/

 

An interesting alternative view on it from Torvalds:

I would be much happier if they had stuck to the Gen8 size and took the "dead space" at the top to support 2 more 3.5HDDs and at least 2 2.5 HDDs instead, so that's what killed it for me, to be honest

 

Just watched that video.

I'm still fine with not running ECC. The cost of an equiv xeon CPU + extra ECC ram would have not been worth it...even if it 100% guarenteed 5 'nines' of availability.
If I'm getting even 3 'nines' of availability now I'm quite happy...If it were that important to me I would have it on a UPS too.

 

That would be a decent option. However to accomodate that, they would need to bump up the power supply, which would also increase the sell price.
I would love to be able to have 6 or more disks in a microserver sized server. Really ideal for power home users.

 

I like the spirit of the microserver to be limited to 4x3.5" drives.
I've owned nearly every generation of them and it's kept me from going crazy with high drive count builds.
I have a mantra of 4 storage drives only and I upgrade density when I need more space. It keeps the age of my drives usually within warranty periods. Old drives are retired to cold storage duties or sold on.

 

Apart from not wanting to pay the money for a new Gen10 Plus. it looks awesome and have a perfect space for it in the HTPC unit and would be a great upgrade. what's the chances of using it as a HTPC. Does it fit a slimline graphics card in it?

im guessing from the post above you can use an integrated graphics on the cpu?

 

Yeah slimline gfx card can be installed.
Unfortunately it suffers from the downside of other intel microservers in that you can't use the Intel onboard graphics.
It has matrox onboard gfx.
Intel Quicksync is disabled too as a result. So no quick plex transcoding.