Posted on 5 Comments on HP ProLiant LO100 Advanced License

HP ProLiant LO100 Advanced License

For those of you that have an older HP ProLiant server that has the HP Onboard Administrator powered by Lights-Out 100 (LO100) and want to gain two additional features, I will provide the key at the bottom.

The two features are:
*Virtual Media Access
*Virtual KVM

I haven’t used either of the features and the Virtual KVM requires JavaScript to be enabled but it seems very outdated that most current browsers with JS enabled, will not load the Virtual KVM page.

Anyways, incase anybody wants to mess with both features, here is the key:

Application License Key
Current License Key:35DRP-7B3TX-78VVM-7KX4Y-XS74X
Current License Key Type:LO100 Advanced INDIVIDUAL

For a full list of specifications, features and configurations, please see the following HP Support article here.

Posted on 5 Comments on HP Ml150 G6 – Storage newb

HP Ml150 G6 – Storage newb

I’m back with the ML150! 2018 was a rough year but now that it’s in the rear view mirrors, I can sit back, reflect and move forward. I started focusing more at work to keep myself busy through a few difficult times and in mid-2018, I was involved in a large network outage that took weeks to rectify with a new network rebuild. That’s another story in itself that I won’t get into.

I’ve finished my home office and I’m eager to continue my projects, the HP ML150 and my tinkering of all electronic and IT related areas.

In my corporate setting, I’ve inherited a three node VMware ESXi cluster, a two node XenServer cluster and one lonely serer running Hyper-V about 2 years ago. The ESXi cluster had its vCSA ‘broken’ as I’ve detailed here. I resolved the vCSA issue and it’s worked great since, but that whole process had me on the edge.

This is the exact reason why I am building this ESXi node at home, so that I can learn and break things in my safe environment.

I bet that if you are visiting my site and have read my previous posts, you may be wondering what I’ve decided to do regarding storage. Storage in general, is a foreign area for me that I’d like to get learn and get better at. Keep on reading…if you want to 🙂

So the ML150 G6? Well I was able to acquire the a HP P410 Raid card with Battery Backed Write Cache and a 512mb cache memory module. My only concern about this card is and was that it will do SATA 3 (6Gbps) speeds on SAS and SATA 2 (3Gpbs) speeds on SATA interfaces. Link to the HP P410 Controller Overview.

Initially I wanted to run a few 500gb SSD’s but that’s been put on hold for now due to the Sata 2 speeds of the RAID controller. I was able to purchase two 1Tb 3.5″ Seagate SAS drives that I wanted to install but I realized that I was missing the correct cabling. I purchased Mini-SAS to SFF-8087 cables, but those are incorrect and will not work with SAS drives.

The image below shows the difference between the SATA interface and the SAS interface. The difference is obvious.

SATA vs SAS Interface

With the wrong cable purchased and wanting to use the SAS drives that I have, I ordered the following cable: Mini SAS 36P SFF-8087 to SFF-8482+15P. 

  • Mini SAS 36P SFF-8087 to SFF-8482+15P cables

With the SAS cables still being in transit somewhere, I’ve resorted to just using the HP P410 Controller with the original Mini SAS to 4-Sata SFF-8087 cables and two regular SATA WD Green 2TB 7200RPM drives.

While reviewing my storage options, my interest peaked in ZFS and I purchased the highly recommended IBM M1015 RAID aka LSI SAS9220-8i
controller. I suspect this is something I will dig into but not just yet. Right now I have to get this server up and running as I want to tackle some VMware projects in the coming weeks.

The physical storage for now is sorted. I installed VMware ESXi 6.5 Build 4564106 onto a USB flash drive that is plugged directly onto the motherboard of the server. No need to utilize any raid controller ports nor sata ports for a small hypervisor install.

Booting the server, I entered the HP P410 controller configuration and setup RAID-0 (NO RAID) with the two, 2TB drives. This is a lab. I can afford the loss of a drive/data. This server and this datastore will not hold any of my critical data and is only a test environment.

Raid-0 will provide me with striping and that’s fine by me as I want the most speed possible in my given situation.

I had planned to install ESXi on a smaller , non protruding USB Flash drive from the manufacturer Verbatim (16gb USB2). The ESXi installation would near 75% and crash with a timeout error. After trying a few times and trying different USB ports, it turns out the flash drive was the issue. I used a completely different brand flash drive to host the ESXi installation and it worked on the first try.

Here are two snips of my VMware ESXi management interface.

That’s about it for tonight. The ESXi install took way too long because of that oddly performing flash drive.

Long term plans are to bring in a NAS with an iSCSI interface so that I can mimic an external datastore that is not directly attached to the server. I will be building my lab-corporate environment that consists of a few Domain controllers that will run a select number of features. I would like mess with DHCP split scopes, WSUS, iron out some GPO skills and mess around with VMware.

I would like to setup vCSA here at home and possibly another node to build a 2-node cluster, but that’s not yet.

Thanks for reading and till the next post!


Posted on 5 Comments on HP Ml150 G6 – Redundant Fan Sourced!

HP Ml150 G6 – Redundant Fan Sourced!

As you may recall from my last post here, I am trying to run two Xeon CPUs and a lot of memory, thus I need the HP Redundant fan configuration. I purchased the wrong fan (Part Number: 519740-001), thinking I can use it in the redundant fan slots. As you found out, I discovered HP Part number 513927-B21 / now revised as 519737-001, to be the correct option.

I jumped on ebay and ordered 519737-001 and had it delivered a few days ago. Once I got home from work, I opened up the server and I hoped that the server starrs would all align and my concerns would be nulled.

VOILA!!!!!!!!

The fan/server work fine and this should be all I need.  Of course I could add the 4th fan for further redundancy, but until these fans get a bit cheaper I’ll hold off.

Below I’ll show you the difference between the 519740-001 ‘System Fan’ and the 519737-001 ‘Redundant Fan’.

As you can see, the difference is quite large between the two.  I’m glad I decided to spend a bit more and order the correct fan than to hack up the case and make the other system fan work.  The air direction baffle sits properly over the fan/heatsinks so I’m a happy camper.

Last but not least, I fired up the server and was able to get 98,304MB of memory recognized.

The next step for the server is apply the most recent bios firmware to bring the server up to date.  I was able to source the HP SPP (2017.04), which was the last SPP with G6 Support.

Now I am still unsure what to do with hard drive and storage. I have a few 2.5″ SAS drives that I could run in there but I’m uncertain what raid controller I should look for. I’ll have to do some more digging into that.

 

Posted on 15 Comments on HP ML150 G6 – This fan? That fan? What fan?

HP ML150 G6 – This fan? That fan? What fan?

Last night was fun. I thought I have had all the correct parts to upgrade and beef up this server. I was wrong. I ordered the wrong system fan 🙁

There seems to be some confusion and not enough clarity on what fan(s) are required when upgrading this server from a 1-processor to a 2-processor configuration. When I was ordering my parts and covered my server expectations in my initial post here, I never really explained what I was ordering for the server.

I spent a bit of time trying to find ways to cut costs any way I can. I looked at using the HP ML330 G6 heat sinks and the ML330 G6 system fans. I wanted to give it a try as they tend to be a bit cheaper than the ML150 G6 parts but I chickened out. I chickened out because looking at both the ML150 and the ML330, there is a air direction baffle inside both servers that directs the air flow from the front system fans – through the heat sinks – and out the back. The air direction baffle on the ML330 looks at first glance perfect but it appears to have tiny adjustments for the heat sink that is located underneath the baffle.

Either the heat sinks on the ML330 are taller then the heat sink on the ML150 or the air direction baffle is shorter on the ML330 vs the ML150. I didn’t want to experiment so I forked out the money and purchased the following:

  • ML150 G6 OEM heatsink from aliexpress
  • ML150 G6 fan also from aliexpress (INCORRECT FAN/Part Number…keep reading!)

The parts arrived and last night I started installing them.  The easiest thing to test was the fan and within a moment of trying to install it, I realized it was the incorrect fan.  Let me explain what I found.

HP designed the ML150 G6 (unsure about the ML110 or the ML330) with 3 different kind of fans (from what I can see).

  1. Front Main System Fan (519740-001)
  2. Redundant Front System Fan (519737-001)
  3. Rear Case Exhaust system Fan (unknown part number at this time)

Below I’ve attached an outdated chart of what HP recommended for fans.  Part number 513927-B21 looks to have been updated to: 519737-001, according to this HP Customer Advisory.

The first and main front system fan is the HP 519740-001.  This is a thicker fan and seems to have a grill at the back of it (facing the motherboard).

For the HP ML150 G6 to use redundant/additional system fans, the next part number that needs to be purchased and installed is 519737-001.  The aliexpress seller that I listed above identified their fan as 519737-001 but what arrived was another 519740-001.  This was unfortunate as it won’t work without some slight case hacking.

You may be wondering, what’s the big deal and why can’t it work? Well that’s what I thought until I tried to install it.  When HP designed the spacing for the additional fans, they used a smaller and thinner profile so that the fans will have enough clearance under the airflow baffle.

The first image above on the left shows the HP 519740-001 system fan installed with the air direction baffle installed.

The middle image shows the baffle removed and two front fans exposed.  The top fan is the 519740-001 and the bottom fan is 519737-001.  Look at the design and difference.  It’s not a massive difference but it’s enough to prevent the baffle from fitting.

The far right image shows the system with the 3 fans at the front and one in the rear.

If you try to fit the 519740-001 fan into a slot where 519737-001 should be, the mounting points will be completely off.

Above you can  see that I tried to fit the 519740-001 into the other fan slots.  The tabs and mounting points do not line up.   Thus, the 519740-001 cannot be used (without hacking up the case) in the ML150 G6 as redundant fans.

With all that said, I choose to re-purchase another fan from a seller that correctly identifies the fan being as 519737-001 with the corresponding images.
The 513927-B21 / now revised as 519737-001, can be found at a reasonable price on eBay, if anybody is looking for one.

The reason I keep referring to the incorrect and now clarified and correct part number is to make this as clear as possible for anybody looking at upgrading a HP ML150 G6.

The final system fan is the exhaust fan, at the rear of the case.  This is a black fan that does not have any blue housing.  You can see it in the system images above.

That was my evening last night. I’m glad I’ve sorted out my confusion and wish there was a more documented or updated list available from HP for this.  If not for that customer advisory from HP, I wouldn’t have realized which fan part number is correct for this server.

With all that fan nonsense out of the way, I proceeded to install the new-to-me Intel Xeon E5540’s onto the motherboard with Kryonaut Thermal Grizzly thermal grease and the stock heat sinks.

With the heat sinks installed, I proceeded to re-attach all the motherboard cabling and filled the rest of the memory banks with Kingston kvr1066d3d4r7sk3/24g.  This should give me 96 GB of memory.

That’s all I have for now. I’m waiting for the last fan to arrive so that I can power on the server and start slowly configuring it.

 

Some uncertanty that I have is, what do I do for storage? Right now, I’ve installed three hard drives into the server cage:

  1. HP Enterprise 7200RPM, 250GB HDD (Planned for hypervisor storage)
  2. WD Blue 750GB HDD
  3. 2TB Hitachi HDD

I would like to play with a different raid configuration than what comes built onto the motherboard. I am unsure of what RAID controller to purchase or how to approach storing data on here.

I do have a few enterprise grade SSDs that I would like to use with this server so I would need to get SATA 3 operational in the server.

Another future post that I will write about will be regarding updating the HP ML150 G6 Bios/Firmware.

 

Stay tuned!

 

 

EDIT:

I found a HP ProLiant ML150 G6 Server – Option Parts list.  This is a good reference for any upgrades on this server model.

Link here.

Posted on 3 Comments on HP ML150 G6 – The start of my first homelab!

HP ML150 G6 – The start of my first homelab!

I’ve planned doing this for a while but I just never got around to doing it. Building myself my first homelab with a new to me HP ML150 G6.

I’ve thought about this long and I’ve tried to make sense of why I do in fact need a homelab.  Well for a few reasons.

  1. Replicating a lot of stuff I do for work, in a lab will help me grow and learn. Working in a 24/7, 365 day environment is extremely difficult. I need to be able to work on certain projects in my spare time and practice so that I can deploy them in a live environment.
  2. I need more practice and experience with Hypervisors.  During my day job, I have access or our Vmware ESXi infrastructure but there really isn’t a whole lot to do in our environment.  We do have two other Hypervisor’s in use (Microsoft Hyper-V and Xenserver), which will be decommissioned over the span of a few months and the servers moved onto ESXi.
  3. Building a home network would help me work on skills that I lack in and need to improve on. Working on a proper firewall, such as PFsense or Sophos for home would allow me to step away from the typical consumer grade software/hardware and deal with it on a daily basis at home.
  4. Hosting a game server or two for friends is important for me.
  5. Lastly, I will be preparing to write my CCNA so I’d like to create some kind of working lab (GNS3 or physical) in home home office.

Now as this is my first homelab, I don’t have high standards for the hardware.  I know I don’t want a rack or a rack mounted server. I don’t have the space for it. My house is old and small and I need something much smaller.  A tower server would suite me well.
Tower server’s tend to be a bit quieter as there is much more air flow, thus the fan’s don’t necessarily need to be extremely fast, powerful nor loud.

I have a friend that was selling a tower server I helped him acquire a year ago. It’s an HP ML150 G6. This is a pretty basic server for me but looks like it will work fine.  Looking at the specifications from HP, it was an entry model unit, so it doesn’t have all the higher end components on it. Not a problem.

HP states that this server can take up to 48GB of memory, with both CPU’s occupied. This is a bit of a bummer as I do plan on having a bunch of Virtual Machines and I don’t like being limited by such an amount.  Reading up on the forums regarding this server, many people have been able to surpass the 48GB limit.  Reading this, I test installed 6 sticks of DDR3 ECC server memory.  I currently only have one processor (Intel Xeon E5504 but I have two E5540’s on the way!) installed so I can only use 6 memory slots of the 12 available.

With 48GB of memory installed in the 6 memory slots, I turned on the server and it fired up as normal.  Checking BIOS, it reads the memory just fine. WUNDERBAR!

So now for me to utilize 96GB of memory, I need the following:

  1. 2x Intel Xeon E5540 CPU’s
  2. Second HP ML150 G6 Heatsink
  3. Third system fan for the second CPU installation

I ordered all the components and now I’m playing the waiting game for all the items to arrive.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten with the server. With a hectic personal life and a busy work schedule, I don’t have a whole lot of time.  This will change soon!

The HP ML150 G6 comes with SATA 2 (3Gbps) speeds.  As I would like to run an enterprise Samsunsg SSD or possibly a few SAS drives, I will need to look into a RAID controller which will give me faster drive speeds.  This server came with the built in HP Smart array B110i SATA Raid controller, which can do RAID 0, 1, and 10.

So the next step is to look into a storage solution.  I don’t want to run an external data store. I need to  keep power consumption as limited as possible for the server. I plan to have a few hard drives in a raid fashion, stored inside the server.

For personal data, I do have an older HP EX490 server (not stock) that I use for storing images, videos and personal data. The data is saved and replicated to a total of 4, 2TB drives.  It’s a older server but it’s worked great for my needs at home.

That’s about it. It’s time to sign off and get some sleep before digging into deploying Bit Locker at my workplace.

Once the components arrive, I’ll create a follow-up post and will document my journey from start to finish.

 

Thanks for reading 🙂