Today, I open a new gift to the homelab - an HP MicroServer Gen8. This little chonky cube is full of hard drives and not a whole lot else, making it a perfect test system for ZFS, TrueNAS, Proxmox VE and Proxmox Backup Server, etc. and I’m already planning the videos I want to make with it. So come along as I open it up and see roughly what’s inside, the specs, and use HP iLO (their proprietary IPMI) for the first time.

Video⌗

There’s a video of my fun. Click on the thumbnail to watch it on Youtube. Thumbnail

Exterior⌗

Here are some pictures of the exterior of the case. There aren’t many ports, dual gigabit NICs, two USB2, two USB3, VGA, and iLO’s dedicated Ethernet. The one PCIe half height expansion slot has been filled with an LSI SAS card.

Exterior Front

Exterior Rear

Internals⌗

Inside, there’s a handy SD card slot and USB port to plug in your boot media (if you don’t want to boot off the data drives). There’s also an extra SATA port that’s labeled ‘ODD’ (optical disk drive), although that isn’t installed on this model. This modified unit has the power cable for the DVD drive connected to a 2 port Molex to SATA power cable to power the extra 1TB 2.5" hard drives.

Interior