With the cashback offers on the HP Microserver many of us have purchased one, or more, of them to do a variety of tasks in the SOHO environment, such as backup servers, technology labs and more. I’d bought mine for a lab environment to play with the new windows technologies and discover more. Upgrading to 8 or even 16gb of ram enables a useful HyperV machine. Add a couple of drives to create some Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8 storage spaces.
With all the hard work done with the setup of the lab environment and a spare Smart-UPS SC620 I’d wanted to follow some more best practice, and fun, and get the UPS supporting the Microserver. The Microserver has lots of USB ports but no serial port so purchasing a startech PCIe low-profile serial card was a good start. This, along with the HP Remote Access Card Kit use both the free PCIe slots on the Microserver.
I’ve used the card with Smart-UPS and Windows 8 successfully with the APC powerchute software including email notification. With around two hours standby time running four lab virtual machines it’s an excellent solution. If the Microserver had been used in a business environment with Windows 2012 Foundation or Essentials this would be a piece in the contingency puzzle.
Together with the current Windows Azure backup solutions the puzzle gets closer to being completed.