Loading Up Your HP N40L MicroServer With 16GB Of RAM
For those using an HP ProLiant N40L MicroServer as a home lab for their ESXi adventures, one concern you may have is over the limitation of 8 GB of memory that is stated in the supported specifications. 8 GB puts up a barrier in some cases where you’re starved on memory but still have a lot of the dual core AMD Turion II processor left over. This limitation tickled my curiosity, along with the requirement of ECC UDIMMs, to the point where I’ve been trying a various assortment of memory sticks to see if I could get them to work.
I’ve recently acquired and successfully tested a pair of Corsair 8 GB sticks (purchased from Amazon) that are very budget friendly and do indeed work. They have also shown no signs of buckling under some load testing pressures with both Memtest and Prime95, my two stress tests of choice.
In a prior video review of the N40L, I stated that some others had adventured into the realm of hitting 16 GB using a combo deal overseas. Well, now you can do the same for about $80.
Shopping List
If you’d like to populate your N40L with a pair of 8 GB sticks, I recommend you cruise on over to Amazon and acquire these sticks:
Corsair 8GB XMS3 (1x 8GB) DDR3 SDRAM 1333MHz 240-Pin 8 Not a kit (Single) (PC3 10600) CMX8GX3M1A1333C9 (Link)
They are currently going for around $39 a stick and qualify for Amazon Prime shipping. Keep in mind that, as the title states, this is a single stick – order them in quantity 2 for the N40L. It’s a bit of a pain getting all the wires and such out of the way to remove the motherboard tray but well worth the trouble. Once inserted, I was able to power on my N40L without any additional configuration, connected the vSphere client to the management IP, and saw the results above.
The wrong kind of RAM
Also keep in mind that I’m not saying that this is a supported configuration. Part of the fun in a vSphere home lab is tinkering with unsupported configurations. 
Thoughts
Although the dual core Turion II is still a bit on the lean side for my tastes, the ability to boost the N40L into 16 GB of RAM for cheap opens up a lot of possibilities. Not only can it easily run a handful of VMs for a home lab but it may also be a good target to install Nexenta on in lieu of a NAS box. The extra memory provides a good amount of cache for the ZFS-based array to consume, and the community edition can handle 18 TB of data at no charge which should nicely cover the 4 ~ 6 drives that the N40L can house (depending on if you use the eSATA port and DVD port for drives).
I’d say that if you’re starting off a home lab this is a great box to consider. Later, if you grow out of the hardware, you can still use it as a NAS box, a management ESXi server, or even as a test ESXi host for trying out oddball configurations with.
Are you considering expanding up to 16 GB of RAM? Care to share your experiences and configurations of the N40L? Leave a comment below!
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Excellent, thank you for taking your time to test them out.
It’s a shame as you say it’s a beat on the weak side, but they are great units, still providing great cash back on them.
Thank you very much for this,
G.
Hi Chris,
don’t you have problems with the Memory detection after a reboot? I have the same Sticks installed into my N40L but 5/10 reboots it shows 8GB and the other 5 16GB of memory.
Regards,
Fred
I have not encountered this issue after four restarts, including upgrading the host from 5.0 to 5.1. I can only relate my experience which has been a positive one.
Hi,
Which Bios version do you use?
The current release – O41
Hi,
There was a guy called Steve that wrote in one of your other posts the following;
“I also am having issues re the CMX8GX3M1A1333C9 8GB sticks. 50% of the time (and randomly it seems) it is showing as 8gb in the BIOS while at other startups its showing as 16gb.”
That’s a shame, however I have not encountered this issue. Realistically, if the only issue is RAM detection on reboot, I don’t see it being a show stopper for a home lab environment (unless you frequently reboot).
Very much so
A point well made, thank you very much.
Gabi.
Very cool timing on this post, as I’m looking at hardware for setting up my home lab. Been relying on Fusion and/or spare boxes at work for long enough – I want the real deal at the house.
I’m worried about the CPUs in these N40L’s being puny, but I’m willing to give one a shot at this price. Worst case scenario I just turn it into a NAS, right?
You definitely need to be mindful of the dual core CPU. I run 6 VMs on at right now with tolerable utilization and CPU %RDY, and that’s about all I think you could hope for on it. For something like VCAP-DCA study or learning more about vSphere in general I am a big fan of this box (I also grabbed a cheap 1GbE Intel NIC so that I have two uplinks total).
Thanks for the blog post Chris, as always, much appreciated.
Question for you, what kind of storage are you running those 6 VM’s on?
Thanks!
A Synology DS2411+. I’ll have more details on that in a post later this week.
Chris, I also bought this memory for my N40L and had no issues, rebooted a bunch of times and no detection issues, both DIMMS recognized every time.
Thanks for sharing your success, Andrey.
Hi
I’ve just installed 16gb in my HP n40l also and it works.
However, it didn’t on the latest Bios. I had to re flash to the version – 2011.04.02 (A) (27 May 2011) in order it to detect 16gb.
I was using Bios Version 2011.07.29 (A)
25 Aug 2011 but on post detected only 8gb yet in Server 2012 knew there was 16gb but 8gb was usable.
It seems that HP have restricted it to 8gb in their latest Bios version.
What Bios version are you using?
Thanks
Mark
Interesting. I’m on version 041.
Mine is the same version as Chris mentioned, 041.
I came across this post as I am also seeing 8gb and sometimes 16gb after a reboot..my bios is 041..haven’t tried flashing it yet..just thought I’d share my experience
Interesting – I’ve had Nexenta running on an N36L and on an N40L.
Wouldn’t you need battery backup or UPS for the ZFS intent log though?
I found throughput with Nexenta, even with several HDDs was disappointing compared with WHS2011, although Nexenta provides greater versatility of HDD usage.
I felt Nexenta was an Enterprise tool, better for larger drive arrays.
Will return and see how you get on
Judy
Hi Chris,
What kind of software are you using there to monitor your Microserver? (the screenshot)
The screenshots are from the vSphere Web Client.
FWIW If you want 16GB of ECC like I did you can use get these Kingston Modules Kingston 8GB KTH-PL313E/8G
Becareful some shopping search engines will truncate or provide results with KTH-PL313/xG and those modules are not the modules you are looking for as for ECC it must contain the E.
-MJB