I am considering upgrading my stock EX487 to WHS 2011.

As I have never done this type of upgrade before, I'd appreciate any insights into what I should be on the lookout for before I do the install.

The unit I have is one of the original of the EX487's and I have never upgraded any of the hardware, with the exception of the hard drives.

* Is is possible (or necessary?) to upgrade the CPU or the RAM?
* My understanding is the EX487 is a 64-bit machine, is this correct?

I use my WHS for backing up my home computers, as well as being a multimedia server (use it for my iTunes storage).

What other questions should I be asking?

Thanks !

Mike

Hi roarty58 welcome to the forums!

If you read through the forums you will find a wealth of information posted by others who have upgraded their MSS to WHS2011. Your servers hardware can run 64 bit OS no problem at all. The way WHS2011 installs and recovers is quite different than what your use to when using the HP Supplied Disks. The LED's will not function properly but work has been done by others to get them to function well.

One thing that does come to mind is that those who have installed WHS2011 have reported the SMI Area not working properly when they chose to reinstall the original version of WHS that came with the server. So if you indeed wanted to install WHS2011 I would recommend exposing the SMI Area and then making a copy of it before installing WHS2011 that way if you wanted to reinstall the original software you would have a copy of the SMI files. I can help you with exposing this area so you can copy the files and should the SMI area become corrupted or lost you can then create a bootable USB Flash Drive and put the SMI files on it to boot the server from if needed. I highly recommend getting a copy of the SMI files regardless of what you chose to do.

So read what others have already written about installing WHS2011 on there MSS and see if this still interests you or not. If you want to upgrade your server there is information on the site to help you with that as well.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Thank you for the help.

I'm assuming the SMI area is on the system drive in the EX487. Am I correct then that if I remove that drive and use a new drive as the system drive, that should save the SMI area?

Thanks.

~Mike

No its actually stored on the motherboard on the EX47x and EX48x. I also believe its the same on the LX Series. Because its so important its actually hidden by HP when the Service named HPMediaSmartService is running. To expose the SMI area you will need to make a Remote Desktop Connection to your server then disable the service HPMediaSmartService and then reboot the server.

When you do this you need to know that your LED and Health Indicators will not function properly and that your server will send off a bunch of alerts this is only because you just disabled the HPMediaSmartService. Now you need to make a Remote Desktop Connection to your server and look in My Computer and there you will see 3 drives SYS, DATA and the USB SMI which contains the all important SMI files.

DO NOT make any changes to the SMI Area. Set the server so you can view Hidden Files and Folders then insert a USB Flash Drive and simply copy the entire contents of the SMI Area to the USB Flash Drive. Go back to the Services and enable the HPMediaSmart Server and reboot the server so that it will return to normal operation.

Once you have these files I recommend you make multiple copies of them to protect them. The next thing is to make a workable USB Recovery Drive for your server and to do this all you need to do is make a USB Flash Drive bootable and then copy all the SMI Files to the Bootable USB Flash Drive and put it in a safe place. What this will give you is a way to place your server into recovery mode should in the future your SMI Area ever failed. This is one of the things I have seen people report after they try out WHS2011 and then attempt to restore their MSS to the original software.

One thing I would encourage you to do if you do install WHS2011 is not reuse your current drives this way if you should decide that WHS2011 is not for you all you need to do is remove the WHS2011 Drives and pop in the original drives and get back in business. Having a copy of the SMI Files and if you did make a USB Recovery Drive you will be in real good shape to keeping your server functional.

Once again I do encourage you to read what others have written about installing WHS2011 on their MSS and to pay close attention to the exerience of those with the same model server you have to see what they have to say. Its important to also pay attention to those who have chosen to resinstall the original OS back on their server and what issues if any they report.

Personally I run 2 WHS2011 Servers which I built but I have always kept my EX470's running WHS v1 as provided by HP although each server runs different HP software meaning v1.x and v3.x but I also have an HP ProLiant DL running WHS1.0 and I like running both versions of WHS.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Hi roarty58,

I have an HP EX487 that's running WHS 2011 and I'm very happy with it. I will admit there were some growing pains, some of which were the result of Drive Extender's absence and needing to use a third party tool. I use Drive Bender and it works great, even with my complex arrangement of internal disks and USB disks, all of which are BitLocker-encrypted (since WHS 2011 supports BitLocker).

You referred to your EX487 being stock, so I am going to assume you've still got the Celeron CPU and 2 GB RAM. This will run WHS 2011, but you'll probably want to consider upgrading. I snagged an Intel E5300 off of eBay shortly after getting my EX487 (I bought it used from a friend of mine in September 2011); I already had an E5300 in my EX490 and it did me proud so that's what I went with. Depending on what you plan to do with the server, you may consider going for quad core. As Comp1962 noted, there's plenty of discussion all over the forums here on what CPUs you can use.

Do bear in mind that, with few exceptions, if you decide to upgrade the CPU in an EX487, you're going to have to hack the BIOS. I've written a post here on how to do that without a debug cable, but I strongly recommend you get the debug cable if you don't already have one.

Lastly, if you're just using the server to do backups and nothing more, the 2 GB of RAM is probably fine. I like to tax my servers a little harder though -- they can do a lot more than just being "paper pushers" -- and so I kicked mine up to the max (4 GB). I've upgraded both my EX487 and EX490 to 4 GB (DDR2 PC2-6400). These are DDR2 servers, not DDR3. DDR2 memory is a bit more expensive than DDR3, but Newegg often runs some nice sales. They had a sale on the Patriot 4 GB sticks so I picked up two of those, and then sold my 2 x 2 GB sticks on eBay and got a decent chunk of my money back.

Another thing to consider is Solid State Disk. As the developer of the Home Server SMART add-in for both WHS v1 and WHS 2011, I've run across a lot of users using an SSD as their system disk. Several folks have gotten around the 160 GB minimum requirement and are running WHS 2011 from a 60 GB SSD. SSDs offer some nice performance benefits. On the other hand, SSDs are expensive compared to HDDs -- you can pick up a 1 TB HDD for $100 or less; a 128 GB SSD will run you in the ballpark of $180-220, depending on the brand.

_________________
Matt Sawyer
Owner, Dojo North Software, LLC

HP EX490, 4GB, E5300, 15TB - Server 2012 - Sharing and Streaming
HP EX487, 4GB, E5300, 13TB - Server 2012 Essentials - Backups