HP t730 Thin Client as an HP Microserver Gen7 Upgrade

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WANg

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Ironically China's economy is going to be back up and running a hell of a lot faster than the wests'. I've heard estimates of 2-3 months lag time on orders from the big hardware companies if what you're buying isn't already in a warehouse somewhere in NA, which isn't bad all things considered.

I've been tempted a couple of times to gut my DFI DT-122's and rebuild them with Ryzen mITX hardware just to avoid waiting the couple of years it'll take for T740s to drop to under $400 reliably on fleaBay.
Oh, that's not ironic. That's natural - once their grand poobahs give them the green light the workforce goes back in and stuff gets done. Of course, depending on where they get their raw materials and/or parts from, they can also see disruptions in their supply chains. So my guess is 4-6 weeks earliest.

The big attraction with the t740 is their small-ish size and that PCIe x16 slot, and I have yet to find something similar in the USFF/corporate NUC families that can match the features. I can definitely build my own mITX but I doubt I can beat that price (I was quoted ~550 USD for a V1756B model with ThinPro and minimal RAM/storage) and end up with something better. Of course, I am also waiting for AMD to release Ryzen embedded Gen 2. Hopefully we'll see more interesting small boxes for stay-at-home servers.

Huh, that's odd. evilBay shows only European-based resellers for the t740s with a substantial mark-up...no US based vendors.
 

WANg

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Oh my - this is concerning for sure. v1.15 is safe right? that was the most recent release.

got it - not planning on running too many VM's - 2 to 3 at most. Let's see how it goes...
Probably - although if you run into issues, getting it to unlock isn't difficult at all...here's the one for the t620 plus - the t730 version should be rather similar.

https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...rk-appliance-builds.21014/page-11#post-233047

As for the VMs...eh, I run 7 of them at once (my t730 does have 32GB of RAM), so unless you are planning to do wire-speed filtering for multiple Gigabit links, I would not worry too much about it. The t730 is not a massive powerhouse but it's decent for light/medium virt duties.
 

TheJaguar

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Jan 19, 2020
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Probably - although if you run into issues, getting it to unlock isn't difficult at all...here's the one for the t620 plus - the t730 version should be rather similar.

https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...rk-appliance-builds.21014/page-11#post-233047

As for the VMs...eh, I run 7 of them at once (my t730 does have 32GB of RAM), so unless you are planning to do wire-speed filtering for multiple Gigabit links, I would not worry too much about it. The t730 is not a massive powerhouse but it's decent for light/medium virt duties.
Oh, I see. Good to know that you are running that many VM's and the machine is chugging along. Is there a quick way of finding out if SVM is disabled or enabled? If it's disabled, does it completely kill the ability to virtualize? I have just installed proxmox and got it up & running. I will likely add a virtualized instance of pfsense tonight.
 

TheJaguar

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I was able to virtualize and run pfsense on my T730 - yay! have a question - I have 3 gigabit lan cables that I split my WAN connection with. Most pfsense guides describe 1 wan and 1 lan connection, but in my case, wouldn't it be better to have 3 lan bridges and 1 wan bridge (via proxmox) so that I can utilize the full gigabit bandwidth for each lan connection? If I were to go down this path, how would I go about setting up pfsense on proxmox different from the guides available?

UPDATE: after further reading, it appears that the better option in terms of performance is to use a switch rather than use pfsense to behave like a switch, unless I want to filter differently based on the lan cable. Is my understanding accurate?
 
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PigLover

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...UPDATE: after further reading, it appears that the better option in terms of performance is to use a switch rather than use pfsense to behave like a switch, unless I want to filter differently based on the lan cable. Is my understanding accurate?
Yes - this. Anything pfSense does to move traffic between the three lan ports has to be processed by the CPU. Even if that CPU can keep up with the throughput it will add per-packet latency compared to a switch.
 

WANg

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Oh, I see. Good to know that you are running that many VM's and the machine is chugging along. Is there a quick way of finding out if SVM is disabled or enabled? If it's disabled, does it completely kill the ability to virtualize? I have just installed proxmox and got it up & running. I will likely add a virtualized instance of pfsense tonight.
Depends on which hypervisor you are dealing with - if you are on VMWare ESXi (which I am - see the original post on this thread) the hypervisor won't even start if you are missing SVM. In Proxmox SVM is optional but if you are lacking it, well...thats not good if you are running full virt app - if it's Linux it's just a simple matter of doing an:
lscpu | grep svm

AFAIK your t730 should have SVM enabled by default.
 
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PigLover

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Depends on which hypervisor you are dealing with - if you are on VMWare ESXi (which I am - see the original post on this thread) the hypervisor won't even start if you are missing SVM. In Proxmox SVM is optional but if you are lacking it, well...thats not good if you are running full virt app - if it's Linux it's just a simple matter of doing an:
lscpu | cat svm

AFAIK your t730 should have SVM enabled by default.
Likely meant: "lscpu | grep svm".
 

TheJaguar

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UPDATE: managed to get it working - changed settings in settings -> advanced -> misc. I had to restart after that for it to be enabled.

is there anything specific that needs to be done to enable AES-NI in pfsense? In the dashboard page of pfsense, it shows "AES-NI Cpu Crypto: No"
 
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WANg

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UPDATE: managed to get it working - changed settings in settings -> advanced -> misc. I had to restart after that for it to be enabled.

is there anything specific that needs to be done to enable AES-NI in pfsense? In the dashboard page of pfsense, it shows "AES-NI Cpu Crypto: No"
Hm...Go through the BIOS menus and see if there's an option to enable/disable AES-NI. I don't remember if it's there or not...mine is on 24/7 ESXi duty it's not that easy for me to take it down and check.
 

WANg

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Alright, so I think it's a good time to give a status update since I bought the server up in June 2018.

Currently:
- t730 is running ESXi 6.5 U3/build 15256549.
Hardware-wise it's still fitted with 32GB of RAM, a Broadcom Tigon fiber NIC to supplement the built-in Realtek NIC, and a 32GB SSD as the primary boot device and datastore01.

- HP Microserver G7 is running FreeNAS 11.1U7
Hardware-wise it's still fitted with 16GB of DDR3 non-ECC RAM, a 16GB Toshiba USB2 drive as the primary boot device, and 4 4TB HGST 7200 rpm drives forming a ~12TB zraid1 pool, which hosts both the iSCSI extent consumed by the t730 as its primary VM datastore and hosting files for the SMBv2 share. Right now total space consumed on the zpool is roughly 1.5TB.

The t730 is directly connected to the MSG7 via a pair of dualport Mellanox ConnectX3 40/56GBit Eth/IB cards with QSFP 3m DACs for the iSCSI traffic, and both the fiber NIC and the Realtek NIC is also connected to a 8 port Gigabit switch, which also has one uplink to the MSG7's built-in NIC. Then there is a fiber line (with 1Gbit media converters) from the 8 port switch to the rest of the network infrastructure in the apartment. 10Gbit can be an option later, but I am not sure if it's possible to go 10Gbit with the MSG7.

Status:
In terms of the t730, no faults to report. However, VMs that are heavily disk bound does not play well with the iSCSI extent. This does point towards a need to upgrade that 32GB internal SSD to something much bigger (256GB) so the disk-bound VMDKs can stay local on the hypervisor instead of residing on the iSCSI extent hosted by the MSG7.

This would probably require me to do something like this on ssh:
vim-cmd hostsvc/firmware/sync_config
vim-cmd hostsvc/firmware/backup_config
And then pull the config from the HTTP server, then restore on a new ESXi build in the 256GB SSD (which would require a custom t730 thin client firmware to slipstream in the Realtek driver).

The MSG7 is a bit of a tougher customer since it has several issues:
a) The G.Skill Ares DIMM modules do not seem to report its size correctly to the N40L on boot - and this result in the machine reporting RAM capacities of 8 or 16GB depending on which boot. This does mean that any power cycle will have to be actively monitored. If the chassis reports the wrong RAM count it gets power cycled again until the RAM count is 16GB. This is rather annoying but its been there since the beginning.

b) FreeNAS cannot be upgraded beyond 11.1U7 in its current configuration.
The MSG7 is a USB2 only server design, and as such, if the boot media is USB thumb drive based, it'll only boot at USB2 speeds (and most USB2 media speed is pretty bad). Unfortunately FreeNAS 11.2 requires USB3 or else its middlewared daemons will not load entirely before a 480 second time cutoff. If this happens the FreeNAS instance will be...rather unstable. This unfortunate state of affair meant that during a recent upgrade attempt from 11.1U7 to 11.2U8, the initial post-upgrade boot took 3 hours (migration script, middlewared not loading correctly at the next subsequent boot), and after the upgrade the user experience was mediocre to terrible (certain dialogs on both the old and new interfaces times out). This would probably require me to leverage the unused SATA optical drive connection to host FreeNAS/TrueNAS boot media - maybe carry the existing zpool over to the new OS install.
 
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grotto

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Apr 13, 2020
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Hi everyone - I'm very new here so forgive my ignorance please!

I picked up a t730 after reading through this thread, thank you so much for all the great info! I plan to use the box as a little hypervisor. I'm struggling to get disks attached to the internal USB to mount properly on boot.

First, I was trying to actually use a USB flash drive for the ESXi OS install, connected to the internal USB A port. I was able to install ESXi to the USB key but I was unable to boot from it. The internal USB drive doesn't show in the BIOS at all. Okay so I scrapped that plan and just installed ESXi onto the SATA m.2 disk which is fine.

However, I haven't given up on the internal USB. Now I have a 2.5" SATA SSD hooked up to the internal via a USB 3.0 to SATA adapter. A little janky, but I can actually fit the 2.5" drive inside the enclosure above the RAM beside the fan. I want to use this 500gb drive as a 2nd datastore for a VM that needs a lot of storage (300+ gb required) and my m.2 SSD is only 256gb. The drive is hooked up and is getting power, and it shows in the ESXi installer as a valid install target. However, the drive does not appear anywhere in the t730 BIOS and it does not appear in the vmware ESXi web portal tool as an option to add as a new datastore. When I select to "create a new VMFS" partition, it says there are No devices with free space. So ESXi is struggling to mount the drive for some reason. I think this is driven by the BIOS because it's odd that I can't see the 2.5" drive in there at all. Anyone have any suggestions?
 

WANg

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Hi everyone - I'm very new here so forgive my ignorance please!

I picked up a t730 after reading through this thread, thank you so much for all the great info! I plan to use the box as a little hypervisor. I'm struggling to get disks attached to the internal USB to mount properly on boot.

First, I was trying to actually use a USB flash drive for the ESXi OS install, connected to the internal USB A port. I was able to install ESXi to the USB key but I was unable to boot from it. The internal USB drive doesn't show in the BIOS at all. Okay so I scrapped that plan and just installed ESXi onto the SATA m.2 disk which is fine.

However, I haven't given up on the internal USB. Now I have a 2.5" SATA SSD hooked up to the internal via a USB 3.0 to SATA adapter. A little janky, but I can actually fit the 2.5" drive inside the enclosure above the RAM beside the fan. I want to use this 500gb drive as a 2nd datastore for a VM that needs a lot of storage (300+ gb required) and my m.2 SSD is only 256gb. The drive is hooked up and is getting power, and it shows in the ESXi installer as a valid install target. However, the drive does not appear anywhere in the t730 BIOS and it does not appear in the vmware ESXi web portal tool as an option to add as a new datastore. When I select to "create a new VMFS" partition, it says there are No devices with free space. So ESXi is struggling to mount the drive for some reason. I think this is driven by the BIOS because it's odd that I can't see the 2.5" drive in there at all. Anyone have any suggestions?
...did you disable SecureBoot in BIOS, or did you leave it on? The t730 has Secureboot enabled by default it'll skip most USB drives plugged into the internal slot.
Second, what are you using to power the SATA 2.5" drive? I don't remember there being a SATA power header on the t730 motherboard. Does that adapter provide power as well?
 

grotto

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Apr 13, 2020
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...did you disable SecureBoot in BIOS, or did you leave it on? The t730 has Secureboot enabled by default it'll skip most USB drives plugged into the internal slot.
Second, what are you using to power the SATA 2.5" drive? I don't remember there being a SATA power header on the t730 motherboard.
Hi! I figured out a workaround. Instead of connecting the USB-to-SATA adapter to the internal port, I routed the USB cable through a hole in the IO to connect to one of the rear USB ports. This is super janky, I should post a pic so you can all have a laugh. After connecting to a rear port, the USB drive correctly shows in the BIOS on boot and is available to ESXi. From there, I used this procedure to have ESXi treat the USB device as a datastore instead of a passthrough device. USB Devices as VMFS Datastore in vSphere ESXi 6.5


To answer your questions in case they help other users:
1) no, I have not disabled secureboot. It's weird that secureboot would affect the internal port but not the external ports?
2) The power is all integrated in the USB adapter. It's one of these things: https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-SATA-USB-Cable-USB3S2SAT3CB/dp/B00HJZJI84

For anyone worried, this is a temporary setup and there's no mission critical information on the 2.5" disk. The plan is to eventually upgrade the m2 sata to a 2tb SSD.
 

WANg

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Hi! I figured out a workaround. Instead of connecting the USB-to-SATA adapter to the internal port, I routed the USB cable through a hole in the IO to connect to one of the rear USB ports. This is super janky, I should post a pic so you can all have a laugh. After connecting to a rear port, the USB drive correctly shows in the BIOS on boot and is available to ESXi. From there, I used this procedure to have ESXi treat the USB device as a datastore instead of a passthrough device. USB Devices as VMFS Datastore in vSphere ESXi 6.5


To answer your questions in case they help other users:
1) no, I have not disabled secureboot. It's weird that secureboot would affect the internal port but not the external ports?
2) The power is all integrated in the USB adapter. It's one of these things: https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-SATA-USB-Cable-USB3S2SAT3CB/dp/B00HJZJI84

For anyone worried, this is a temporary setup and there's no mission critical information on the 2.5" disk. The plan is to eventually upgrade the m2 sata to a 2tb SSD.
Not strange - many OSes do not boot off USB at all if secureboot is turned on - the earlier builds of ESXi 6 doesn't - only 6.5 and above theoretically would, and I didn't have much luck with it on mine (although I created a custom media image for it, so that's probably why I got the purple screen of death when I booted it with Secureboot). I turn it off and just left it off. It really depend on whether the bootloader on the OS image was cryptographically signed by the vendor and accepted by the BIOS. In your case, if it works on the external it's probably not a Secureboot issue.

Next to check - the internal port could be disabled in the BIOS. Check to see if it is (or not). I didn't remember running into that, ever...but BIOS settings can be different based on the vendor and whether it was pulled from off-lease machines that was returned without clearing the institution specific deployment settings.
 
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WANg

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Alright, so it's COVID19 quarantine induced spring cleaning time. Time to take the entire complex down, shut it off, do some cleaning, prep for some upgrades down the line and do some testing.

So, first thing to do is to shut down all the VMs on the t730, and then shut the t730 itself. Then we'll want to mark the 2 QSFP28 ports down and match it with the correct cable, then dismantle and bring it down from the top of the Ikea Gallant cabinet (which is situated 7 feet above ground in a "computing attic" area.

So, once the t730 is down we can do some testing.

a) Can we boot a t730 with a 65w HP smart laptop power brick?
- Nope. The machine will beep 4 times in a row and not power up. You need at least 90w to power it.

b) What about booting off the internal USB port?
- Also nope, and this has been tested even with the latest v1.15 BIOS (which was flashed), secureboot set to off, virtualization options set to on, and the USB drive recognized post-boot. It just don't like to boot off the internal port, even if it's enabled. I'll need to ping my HP channel rep and ask about this one.



c) Can we peg the heat consumption on this machine and see if the fan noise can be elevated?

Machine was booted off parttedmagic 2019-09-19 x64 on liveCD mode, and within the terminal, the following command was run:
stress -c 6 -m 58 --vm-bytes 512M -h 3

(Create 6 CPU hogs and 58 memory hogs each soaking up 512 Mbytes, and spin up 3 HDD hogs slamming the SSD (an Micron/Crucial MX500 series 512 GB unit used for Windows 10 Professional)

The temp readings were done after about 10 minutes

Sensor 1 (CPU) - 42C
Sensor 2 (DIMM slots) - 43C
SSD - 56C

Here's some external readings done with a laser/IR thermometer (that I actually use in my kitchen for cooking, heh) - RAM slot enclosure reads about 30C...



SSD reads about 33.



The tests were later repeated with the Mellanox ConnectX 3 card inside, an Intel 600p/256GB (used for Proxmox) but with practically the same conditions. Despite the card's heat sink reading about 56C, the rest of the machine only registers a 1-2 degree increase in heat production. The massive heatsink/heatpipe used in the t730 combined with the blower worked amazingly well to wick heat from the system.

The next bit of work would be to get rid of some of the dust bunnies lurking around the system. This involves taking out the blower...
(Delta NS75B03)



Then followed by scrubbing the interior with Q-Tips dipped in 91% Isopropyl Alcohol (I have a small bottle for electronics projects dating back about 9 months)



Once this is done some general scrubbing of the interior was done using the Q-tips + IPA.



The next bit of work was to pull the Sandisk SSD (with ESXi 6.5U3) out, along with the Mellanox CX3. The SSD was replaced with the MX500 with a Win10 build (1809). The task is to update Windows to 1909 along with relevant system firmware and/or BIOS version. The BIOS was updated from v1.04 to v1.15 using the HP/AMI Windows updater. The BIOS update took about 3 minutes. The Windows update took about 2 hours, mostly unattended. While this is happening, it's time to turn my attention to the Microserver G7 N40L. That one was taken down, and under the expert supervision of Peugeot the IT saavy cat, the machine was taken apart for cleaning and upgrade prep-work.



(She's a Torbie, folks - 80% Tortoiseshell, 20% American Shorthair Tabby, and 100% dedicated to inspecting the chassis screws with her tongue)

A major task was to open up the optical bay so I can see how I can fit something on top. Right now I have a regular molex power connector, but no SATA cable. I'll also want to loosen up the fan power connector so I can pull the fan out (The fan is large and responsible for cooling the 4 drive trays and the motherboard underneath) - it's secured by 4 screws in the back (I was removing one of them in the photo above). Note the metallic "tunnel" next to the space reserved for a SATA optical drive. The large unit underneath is the PSU, and the data cables from the SATA drives pass from the bay (In front of the fan) and towards the front, where they are plugged into the motherboard underneath.



So now it's time to remove the motherboard, which is 2 thumb screws to loosen, and disconnect all the cables. Then go to the back and unlock the PCIe slot - Once it's done the entire thing comes out...like so (The Mellanox CX3 on the N40L has been removed). Note that next to the coin battery there is a SATA data port dedicated to that optical bay, but there are currently no SATA data cable there. I'll need to find and install one.



The motherboard was given a dusting. Note the PCIe x4 IPMI port on the original MSG7, and the bootable internal USB2 port.



After the cleaning the motherboard (with the Mellanox card) was slid back in place, and the cables re-connected. Then up on top, a molex SATA power adapter was added, and a SATA data cable (In red) slid through reaching the motherboard below. Peugeot came back to inspect the proceedings.



Made a small discovery - looks like the plastic retaining clip for the allen key included in the MSG7 chassis for securing the drives in the bay broke its bottom clip and would no longer retain the key on the door. What to do?



Twist it 90 degrees to inspect it, and then during the install, twist it 90 degrees in the opposite direction so the top clip is now the bottom clip, like so:



Since there is now a bottom clip keeping the key from falling out, it went back into its place just fine.

After about an hour of further cleaning, the N40L Is ready for service.



Since it's the SMB server for my home and the iSCSI server for the t730 when running ESXi 6.5, it can go back to the rack (twisted 90 degrees so the ports are on the left side)



The machine is fired up, and once the RAM count reads 16GB (it randomly boots between 8192 and 16384MB so I'll have have to power cycle until it's correct) FreeNAS 11.1U7 booted back up. That resumed primary SMB service to the home.

The Windows 10 upgrade on the t730 has been completed, and I captured a disk image via Clonezilla (I might recycle that MX500 to install/test on a t740). The MX500 (with Win10) was swapped out, and the Intel 600p with Proxmox was swapped in. A general Proxmox upgrade was done, some test VMs were fired up - and everything looks good. The machine was booted back into Partedmagic for a heat test, and then a general check was performed to see if the v1.15 BIOS upgrade broke any hypervisor functionality or add the ARIFwd/ACSCtl functionality (it didn't). Once that's done, the original 32GB Sandisk SSD (with ESXi 6.5U3) was swapped back in. We are ready to close it back up, move it back to the attic and plug everything back in.



Well, that was a fairly productive downtime window. Now I'll be able to add a new boot SSD to the MSG7 (Probably a 128-256GB SSD) so we can upgrade FreeNAS to TrueNAS, and with all the labelling work done to clarify the cabling, we should be able to plan for the eventual t740 upgrade deployment.
 
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WANg

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@WANg Beware, these are in fact Intel 82580 (i340) based and don't support SR-IOV.
HP 361T (dualport) and 366T (quadport) are I350 NICs and are somewhat more expensive.
Oh yeah. I should mention for the sake of clarity that both the NC364T and the NC365T are i82580/i340 based and not SRIOV capable.

Whoops. I misread the thread, ordered an NC365T and is now a proud owner of both an NC364T and an NC365T.
yeah, as @tomaash states, only the NC361T/366Ts are i350 dual/quadport NICs
 
May 1, 2020
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I just got myself a t730 and had a question for you guys, since this seems like one of the most active threads on the machine.

It has a touch sensitive (presumably capacitive) power button right? Well mine seems to activate all the time when I handle the machine even with my hands not near the power button and sometimes just from fiddling with cables. Is there a way to fix this, like decreasing the sensitivity? or is this a just something bad about the board and I should contact the seller for a replacement?

Also is this at all a common issue? It's so frustrating working on a machine that will magically turn itself on and sometimes off.