Introducing the mystery product – an HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8

I teased you earlier that I had a special product coming to review and, today, I’m glad to announce that my HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8 has arrived.  Since I had other things going on yesterday evening, I didn’t even get to unbox it, but it will be soon. So, you may be wondering – what is the Proliant MicroServer?

HP introduced the Proliant MicroServer line in 2010 as a general computing server platform aimed squarely at the micro to small business and home office markets.  In June, the company released the Gen8 model which features a nice facelift and changes under the hood.

Like all of the Proliant Gen8 hardware, the MicroServer got a little bling treatment with an aluminum grille/door – making it a very sleek-looking unit.  While the previous version looked like a generic half-sized tower, the Proliant MicroServer Gen8 is almost a perfect 9″ cube.  It is equipped with either a Celeron G1610T or Pentium G2020T processor and can scale up to 12TB of storage and 16GB of RAM.  Preconfigured models come with 2GB of RAM.

The Proliant Microserver Gen8 features a tool-less chassis, four cold-swap drive bays, a DVD drive, several USB ports inside, on the front and on the back of the server.  Even though the form factor deviates from the norm, the inside of the Microserver is still very serviceable, upgradable and accessible.

And one of my favorite things with the MicroServer is, just like all other Proliant servers, it includes iLO – or Integrated Lights Out management for those who may not be as familiar with HP.  iLO is HP’s flavor of an IP management interface (IPMI) and its a solid implementation for remote management for a server.

I’m very curious how this little guy compares to the ML, DL and BL Proliant models that I run in the datacenter.  I’m curious to know if the iLO is as robust or scaled back, how the unit performs and how easily I will be able to integrate this into my ESX home lab.

A picture’s worth a thousand words…

I got my first look and feel at HP Discover earlier this year and I’ve posted a few photos below that I took of the show floor to whet your appetite.  Don’t forget, one of these could be yours, too.  More to come…

Disclaimer: HP provided me with the HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8 and also sponsored my trip to HP Discover this year.  The opinions and views of the hardware written here are entirely my own and have not been influenced or outlined by HP. While they provided me with opportunities, those opportunities came with no strings attached.