Screw it I'll just buy a server instead

Considering the level of difficulty I've been having with getting any hypervisor installed I just decided to give up on my original plan and buy a server. I came across an offer on HP Micro Servers where HP were offering €110 cashback on certain models. After I get my cashback the total cost will have be about €160 for the bare-bones server. How could I say no to that? Ordered on Wednesday night and it arrived this morning, happy days!

Introducing the HP Proliant Microserver G1610T

When I collected the box I was concerned because it looked like the box may have been dropped. The below image should explain what I mean. It looks like there is a handle of sorts on the box itself and it was ripped when I collected it - If this ripped while someone was carrying the box they more than likely would have dropped it. I have to admit I felt slightly panicky when powering it up for the first time...

When I finally removed the server from its box I was pleasantly surprised at just how small this thing is. I was expecting something a fair bit bigger but this fits cleanly on my desk. It's not a whole lot bigger than my hand! My whole setup looks pretty sweet now after some desk re-organisation. I might go into this in a separate blog post.

Stylish

Hand for scale

When it finally came time to power on the server I was nervous.. but for once things went my way and it booted up without issues! Setup was a breeze with HP's intelligent provisioning wizard. A few clicks of my mouse and I had it up and running ready to go. The only issue I encountered was trying to access the iLO console - For those of you that do not know what iLO is, it allows me to mange and interact with the server from my computer via a web browser. It's almost as if I have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard connected to the server. Really handy feature. I tried to give iLO a static IP address so I wouldn't have to go looking for it every time it changed with DHCP. However this IP address did not allow me to access the server, and I could not ping the address from the command line. A reboot of the server seemed to resolve this - DHCP had been re-enabled after the reboot and the new IP worked. I just changed this to static and all was well with the world! :)

What did not occur to me when I was buying the server was that there was no HDD included in it so there wasn't a whole lot I could do disappointingly. Some time in the next few days I will get around to installing ESXi using the internal USB slot and hook up the second SSD from my desktop for VM storage. I might finally get around to setting up some VMs! But let's not jinx it..