HPE EC200A Xeon D-1518 'hybrid server' on ebay ~$150

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WANg

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The price went up to $165+shipping without BO now.
The seller also posted a Buy-it-now for 330 and 1500 - well, what can I say, good luck trying that hustle. It's worth considering (maybe?) at 150, a little less at 165, but at 330 or 1500 it became a ridiculous prospect.
At this point it might be a good idea to keep tabs on OEM versions of the Supermicro E200/E300 so it can be snapped up for a song when the device goes into EOL/EOS.
 

dirkthedaring83

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The seller also posted a Buy-it-now for 330 and 1500 - well, what can I say, good luck trying that hustle. It's worth considering (maybe?) at 150, a little less at 165, but at 330 or 1500 it became a ridiculous prospect.
At this point it might be a good idea to keep tabs on OEM versions of the Supermicro E200/E300 so it can be snapped up for a song when the device goes into EOL/EOS.
Hopefully they are more reliable?
 
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mmo

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As @Senses3 mentioned that the seller (should be the same one) had bought a lot of 500 units to resell, it's about a little over 1/5 had been sold already and the raised price definitely will slow down the sales since the price is not great anymore. And totally agree with @WANg, SM will be much more bullet proof with their build quality.
 
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WANg

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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
Wow. Going through what you’ve said and some of the product white papers, It doesn't really bode well for a product (the HPe/Zynstra stack) when their mid-tier offering (the EC200a) is essentially a maxed-out version of the bundled hardware (64GB RAM + 512GB M2 SSD + a pair of 4TB HDDs), and I think the highest tier is an ML110 Gen10. Well, that would explain them being constantly pounded by workloads, but it only partially explain why overheating is a problem. Is it that chassis corner where the iLO is located...Or is it something else? Where do the customers tend to place their machines? I can imagine some not-very-technical manager at a public school or a doctors office just placing them on an office shelf with no ventilation...

HPe tends to gimp their low end offerings to keep them from competing against their more profitable products, and this is putting an abbreviated version of their Microserver concept to work (although they do have the significantly more future-resistant Edgeline EL1000+Moonshot m510 floating around).

You can probably see some of the engineering from the EC200A reused in the Microserver Gen10 Plus. Hey @Patrick, see any familial resemblance between the 2?

The thing I found even more interesting is that not many disk expansion units and network cards came out of this liquidation lot, which kinda tells you how many deployments went with the HA clustering (one of the suggested enterprise deployment profiles) and/or the extra storage options (of course, if I have that much live data to dance with I'll probably spec out something beefier than a single machine with 6 SATA drives). It seems that the most popular deployment was a single standalone machine per site. That does beg of question of how the Zynstra stack deals with backups and data resilience...I am guessing the subscription probably included some cloud based backups or replication mechanism?

Oh well, if the entire allure was to buy the boxes and the Zynstra contract and let HPe do the bare minimal automatic setup, well...it's still not wise to buy something at full price for a 3-4 year contract with zero growth margin - nowadays it'll probably be done with something like a Lenovo ThinkSystem SE350 (much more growth options) or (at least) a cluster of TinyMicroMini machines. Would’ve been nice to do a case study and see what would’ve have been available back in 2016.
 
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parkranger

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Can anyone recommend a 32GB RAM module compatible with this server? I'm currently using one stick of Samsung M393A4K40BB0-CPB recommended earlier in this thread, but having issues with it. Not sure if it's the memory or not. iLO reports issues with Advanced ECC Mode. Has anyone had success with this module on this server?
 
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Dark-Vex

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Guys, do you know which kind of M.2 SSD does it support? I bought a WD Green M.2 2280 SATA 120Gb just for boot but it seems is not detected
 
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dirkthedaring83

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Guys, do you know which kind of M.2 SSD does it support? I bought a WD Green M.2 2280 SATA 120Gb just for boot but it seems is not detected
I bought this and it works fine: Amazon.com: Toshiba 256GB XG5 OEM High speed Single-Sided 80mm (2280-S2-M) PCI Express 3.1 x4 (PCIe Gen3 x4) NVMe M.2 Internal SSD Solid State Drive, High Speed up to 2700 MB/s Read, 1050 MB/s Write (OEM Packing): Computers & Accessories I also bought a Samsung 970 EVO Plus from BestBuy which also works.
 
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mmo

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WANg

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i think it's the lot of 10 listing, it was $1500 but now is $1600.

oh yeah, it was 1500 for a lot of 10 - there is a seller with a single pristine machine with original packaging but that one is 900. There’s another one that has the “premium” configuration (64GB RAM, 2x4TB) but the seller is asking for nearly 2k, and at that price, well, good luck.

Hmmm...Looks like the vendor is operating a bunch of sock puppet accounts on eBay spreading the offerings to multiple listings, and to no one's surprise sales seemed to have slowed down once he removed the best-offer and put on a buy-it-now.
 
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McKajVah

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Has anyone tried to to use a NVME to PCI-e adapter and see if the PCI-e card gets recognized? Was thinking of maybe adding a storage controller or something similar....
 
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WANg

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Has anyone tried to to use a NVME to PCI-e adapter and see if the PCI-e card gets recognized? Was thinking of maybe adding a storage controller or something similar....
Ehh, at the very least you’ll need an extension ribbon to bring the slot from the bottom of the server to the top - I am not even sure if you can do that without exceeding some maximum cable limit for PCIe (PCIe 3.0 ribbon max length is, what, ~20cm?). Even if you fold it 90 degrees and bring it to the other side from the right the closest board feature is the CPU and the heat sink, making it awkward to mount.
 
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parkranger

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Sorting through drivers. Does anyone have a compatible driver file for this device?

"Unknown device"
Hardware ID: ACPI\VEN_HWPE&DEV_0001
 
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Mymlan

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I've copied a mirror for the latest HPE 2020.03.2 Service Pack in case they return to requiring entitlement. I can confirm that the iLO shows no changes in the firmware versions after updating:

Firmware NameFirmware VersionLocation
HPE Ethernet 1Gb 4-port 366i Adapter - NIC1.2529.0Embedded
iLO2.73 Feb 11 2020System Board
Intel(R) I350 Gigabit Network Connection1.1375.0Slot 4
Intelligent Platform Abstraction Data12.02System Board
Intelligent ProvisioningN/ASystem Board
Redundant System ROMU26 v1.00 (04/14/2016)System Board
Server Platform Services (SPS) Firmware3.0.3.9.1System Board
System Programmable Logic DeviceVersion 0x07System Board
System ROMU26 v2.66 (07/19/2019)System Board

Here's the download link: