HPE EC200A Xeon D-1518 'hybrid server' on ebay ~$150
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Are you sure about that? I had Windows 10 and Server 2019 running on this without any issues.
How were they usually bundled as shipped to customers, hardware-wise? I remembered reading their case studies where one of the deployment profile was a clustered setup with 64GB of RAM (maxed), Windows Server VMs that consumed up to 56GB of RAM (with 8GB for the Zynstra orchestration). How does it jive compared to HPe's own sizing guide?
Who were their target customers, and how much was this Zynstra bundle? My guess is that they are trying to keep CapX low and OpX consistent?
How were they generally deployed? Is it replacing the usual front-office in-store-processor for retail locations, or is it mostly a backoffice inventory/warehouse supply chain thing?
Is there a way to restore the originally shipped Zynstra disk images back to the machine just to give this thing a test drive?
Did anyone in the partnership manage to make money from the EasyConnect line, or was it mostly a dud? I didn't see NCR pushing the product after their buyout of Zynstra in late '19.
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The BIOS could've been updated/unlocked after a while, so I am not surprised if they can run Win10/WinS19 nowadays.
Also, that restriction might've been specific to certain deployment profiles - the EasyConnect line was pitched to both large retailers (virtualized in-store processor for POS) and education customers (where they ran Windows Deployment services + hosted VMs).
Received today the three that I've ordered, boot is quite fast compared to Microserver Gen 10 and Gen 8, for testing them I've reused the 16 Gb module that I use on the Microserver Gen 10, it's a Samsung M391A2K43BB1-CRC 16GB 2Rx8 2400MHz PC4-19200 UDIMM
The fan goes full jet engine at max speed. So I'm trying to swap in another fan. But since that won't be enough by itself then. I'll cut open the cover to have a big fan blowing fresh air in from the top. But first I need to fool iLO's PWM tach reading I believe. Otherwise just says no fan connected.
Yeah well, there's only, like, what 6-10 of those fully boxed machines with HDD brackets, while there are probably around 60-100 of those EC200a machines without brackets.
I am surprised the forums at serverbuild.net didn't jump on this one yet. These machines seems to be right up their alley...
Yeah, I don't think the link to them has been posted over there yet or on their discord so they probably don't know about it. Maybe I'll swing over there and post it
Do it. At least it'll keep them from using ex-OEM CSE-815s for firewalls (seriously, how many 1U Nehalem Xeons or Magny-Cours Opterons do you need?) or buying up obsolete pre-Haswell TinyMiniMicro boxes.Yeah, I don't think the link to them has been posted over there yet or on their discord so they probably don't know about it. Maybe I'll swing over there and post it
Yeah, their big kick now is the HP 290s with the G4900t processors.
I'd love to find a hookup on official drive brackets for these things, they seem in short supply. I bet it was because whoever was liquidating these things found it easier to pull the drives with the brackets still attached, and now they're all ewasted...
I plan to use mine for various tasks I want to have available 24/7 - Smarthome platform, Plex server, Wireguard endpoint, SMB shares, data backup.
The only thing I'm reserving my judgement for is the fan noise... Really hopeful this can stay in the living room. Otherwise, I might look at a fan mod. Does anyone have successful examples of a fan swap?
That's been their kick for the past 9 months.
Yeah, definitely tell them about the EC200A.
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I have 3 of these running proxmox. I have a total of 9 VMs running across them. Each of them has 32GB. I run nextcloud, Proxmox Mail gateway, Pi-Hole, Ubuiquiti Cloudkey, plex, crashplan, and an ubuntu and windows vm. They seem to handle all of them fine. I could use additional memory in them though. That would enable me to possibly double the amount of VMs I could run.
there were two configs ( all used same processor, hpe did make others with more beefy processors but unsure if they rver
standered
2x2tb Disk
1x 256gb ssd
32gb ram
Premium
2x4tb disk
1x 516gb ssd
64gb ram
you could also purchase the extension and the extra ports and a fancy stand ( think I still have those at home I’ll have to look )
there was a wall mount so you could mount it on the wall and use it as a WiFi router plus sever, Thee things ( if they ever worked properly ) would have been killer
how ever the Zynstra solution was unique and is still going to this day so I can’t provide you with a image due to a whole lotta laws, it currently runs A whole lotta of other large scale company’s as it is a essentially a self “ healing “ self “ building “ hyper visor. As in it gives you a web page and you can put it the details such as how many windows VMs, Linux VM domain name dns dhcp settings as it automatically builds the VMs for you. This is what makes it popular in retail, all they have to do is ship a box, it builds a load of VMs etc for you and done
HPE thought this would be a gold mine, how ever they failed to count on the fact that people actually want to control there own hypervisor and stuff, Zynstra does not let people into it, you had to pay for there service pack. Which is where the trouble came from
The target customers were mostly SMB’s from schools to small GP clients ( UK ), they also sold larger HPE rack mounted but only to larger clients. These things were not cheap and started at around £120 a month, new they were around £1300 to buy so it made sense to a lot of small company’s to buy there servers and there support at the same time.
the reason you had to reserve 8GB away for the hypervisor was bescuse there were a lot more VMs running
with this solution you also got a firewall and a router ( hence the WAN and LAN port )
the retail is a new thing and they have moved away from ec200as due to there crapness with over heating and reliability. How ever the software is still the same.
We used to have hundreds of these things in the server room as test build boxes purely beacuse we had so many that HPE gave us as they couldn’t sell them
The buy out was purely for the software as they were the first to get to the punch of a “ self building server “ that was commercially viable, people were trying to buy them out for years, and when a deal was made it was for more then 5x the company’s worth just due to the other bids coming in. VMware has something similar if you want to try but they gave up after NcR backed Zynstra and they took off
Spelling mistake in first paragraph * unsure if they where ever deployed outside of
the disk extension thing is also maxed at 24TB but there was a trick to make it go higher. Also pins you see is some weird way HPE decided to make a pcie port ( yes that’s a pcie port with a completely different connector ) as there were many other things you could plug into it,graphics chips,usb extensions wifi modules network cards, only the network cards made it outside of zynstra
answer to someone else’s question about the Windows is that when the customer finished there contract and had ownership of the box we would supply them with the admin password for the bios and the crack to get windows on it, we would always hold on to these to ensure they didn’t use it for something else.
The software if you do get your hands on it needs to be firewalled off as it auto calls home the moment you boot and does a whole lotta other things, but you can get it with out my help ( pretty sure it got leaked a while ago )
the disk extension thing is also maxed at 24TB but there was a trick to make it go higher. Also pins you see is some weird way HPE decided to make a pcie port ( yes that’s a pcie port with a completely different connector ) as there were many other things you could plug into it,graphics chips,usb extensions wifi modules network cards, only the network cards made it outside of zynstra
answer to someone else’s question about the Windows is that when the customer finished there contract and had ownership of the box we would supply them with the admin password for the bios and the crack to get windows on it, we would always hold on to these to ensure they didn’t use it for something else.
The software if you do get your hands on it needs to be firewalled off as it auto calls home the moment you boot and does a whole lotta other things, but you can get it with out my help ( pretty sure it got leaked a while ago )
The updated bios can be downloaded from the link below with free hpe account.
404 Error
techlibrary.hpe.com
Here is a link to the 2020.03.0 SPP, cp040771.exe BIOS update, and the .flash file that I was able to snag and extract luckily before it was pulled: EC200A - Google Drive
Edit: They made the new 2020.03.02 (5 Sept 2020) SPP available again for free and for download on their website if you login: Service Pack for ProLiant | Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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I was given a brand new one about 9 months ago and it died. When I press the power button the power light flashes white and nothing comes on the screen. There is a bank mini green LEDs on the motherboard that are flashing what I believe is an error code but haven't been able to find that info.
Some suggested the cause of the power light flashing was a memory issue, so I swapped out known good memory and the issue persisted.
Some suggested a fan issue so I swapped that out. Still the issue.
I went as far as re-pasting the heat sinks with no luck.
After you've mentioned how they overheat and are not reliable and having just bought 3 in hopes of having a total of four, but thats not going to happen, I'm really concerned that I based my VM cluster on this platform.