It is time to begin provisioning an eventual replacement for our WS 2011. I would really appreciate any input or warnings others have from their own experiences.
It will be built in an HP Proliant Microserver N40L with 4GB of ECC RAM, though we have an HP Proliant ML110 available as well thanks to the mad rebate back in late 2012 that brought it down to the circa £100 N40L prices.
We will have two of the Seagate VB0250EAVER 250GB stock drives available, along with 2x 2TB WD Red and one Toshiba 9F13180 1GB.
Our current WHS 2011 server utilises two separate partitions on a 500GB drive for the system and data, a single 1GB drive for pushed client backups, and 2x 1GB drives in software RAID1 (to avoid any disaster if the HP hardware RAID controller went down) for WHS client images. The server is backed up to an external USB drive. The ODD bay is empty.
We are considering emulating this setup (with the addition of one of the 250GB drives in the ODD bay) and leaving the BIOS as stock as the VB0250EAVER drives cannot exceed the IDE emulation anyway, or having a system drive and using all the other disks together utilising DrivePool with separate pools for data, client push and client images. We would then consider the BIOS upgrade to provide hot swapping. Am I correct in thinking this works after the flash?
We have a Windows Server 2012 Standard licence but would like the additional features of Essentials so have installed the latter before upgrading to Standard, thus leaving us with Standard and the Essentials features, minus the media facilities which are not something this server needs to do anyway.
We will utilise LightsOut, but are unsure given the O/S amalgam which version to use?
Well that is all I can think of this minute, but any coments would be appreciated.