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Homeserver - ESXi on HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10

After Hewlett Packard Enterprise has missed offering a Microserver in their 9th Generation, it is now back in Gen10. The Microserver series provides affordable servers intended to be used in SMB and as home servers. Due to its low price and power consumption, you can find this system in many virtualization home labs as ESXi hosts or Storages.

The HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 is available with two different CPUs - AMD Opteron X3216 and X3421. Both models a SoC which means that the CPU cannot be changed like the Intel CPUs in Gen8. They support up to 32GB of unbuffered DDR RAM. The server can be equipped with 4 hard drive from the front.

  • HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10, Opteron X3216 (2x 1.6 - 3.0GHz / 15W TDP)
  • HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10, Opteron X3421 (4x 2.1 - 3.4GHz / 35W TDP)

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FreeNAS on HP Microserver N54L - Shared Storage for your ESXi

The HP Microserver N54L and its predecessors N40L and N36L are widely spread home servers. I've written about using it as ESXi host in my Homelab about 2 years ago. Today it is still a great system to be used with ESXi but there are better alternatives, especially due to its limited memory and CPU power. That was the reason why I rededicated my N40L to be a central storage and file server with FreeNAS. This post describes what you need to use the N40L as resilient storage and how to configure it properly for ESXi usage. I will talk about NFS sync writes or performance issues with NFS vs. iSCSI and how to work around them.

freenas-on-hp-microserver-n36l-n40l-n54l

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ESXi Issues caused by hp-ams module

I recently had strange issues with Hewlett-Packard servers. ESXi hosts randomly have shown a couple of different symptoms:

  • ESXi host unmanageable
  • ESXi host grayed out in vCenter
  • Starting host services fails with an error message:

    Call "HostServiceSystem.Restart" for object "serviceSystem-[*]" on vCenter Server * failed.

  • Cannot perform vMotion to or from the host
  • Starting virtual machine fails with an error message:

    Power On virtual machine *
    A general system error occurred: The virtual machine could not start
    VMK_NO_MEMORY

  • Restarting services in DCUI fails

    A general system error occurred: Command /bin/sh failed

  • SSH connection to the host possible, but no response after login requests
  • Local console displays an error message:

    /bin/sh cannot fork

  • Error Message received at syslog server

    sfcb-HTTPS-Daemon[*]: handleHttpRequest fork failed: Cannot allocate memory
    crond[*]: can't vfork
    cpu*:*)WARNING: Heap: *: Heap_Align(globalCartel-1, 136/136 bytes, 8 align) failed.
    cpu*:*)WARNING: Heap: *: Heap globalCartel-1 already at its maximum size. Cannot expand)

  • DCUI message log (ALT+F12) displays an error message

    WARNING: Heap: *: Heap globalCartel-1 already at its maximum size. Cannot expand.

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Host Profile Error - Found extra CIM-XML Indication Subscription

When you use Host Profiles to check the compliance of your configuration you might get the following failures against the host profile. The message persists after applying a profile and rebooting the ESXi Host:compliance-error-cim-xml

Found extra CIM-XML Indication Subscription on local system for query SELECT * FROM CIM_ProcessIndication sent to destination https://[URL]
Found extra CIM-XML Indication Subscription on local system for query SELECT * FROM CIM_AlertIndication sent to destination https://[URL]

This compliance error appears on HP Hardware when HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM) is in use. The URL is different for each system, so the host profile can not be applied. To get rid of the message you have to disable CIM Indication Subscriptions in the Host Profile Configuration

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