HP MicroServer Upgrade from N40L to Gen8

[Tony Self]

Hi Guys,
Looking for some pointers from those of you who may have gone through this upgrade in the past.
I already have a HP MicroServer N40L and a Gen8 running TrueNAS Core 12.0-U1. The Gen8 is my main production server supporting my Plex Media Server running as a plugin.
The N40L is my backup/test server. Server details you can see in my signature below.
I have managed to obtain another Gen8 and I propose to upgrade from the N40L to the Gen8.
The big question is can I just swap all the drives on the N40L over to the Gen8 or do I need to build a new installation for the Gen8 and then import the old ZFS pools from the N40L?

 

[Chris Moore]

You should be able to move all the drives, boot drive included, over to the new hardware and boot the system. The one problem I expect you to run into is that the NAS OS will not see your NIC, because it is still in the old system, so you will need to plan on accessing the local console to configure the IP address. Once that is done, you should be able to access the web UI to check the system. After setting the IP address, it may take a reboot to get everything to come back up the way it was, but it has been my experience that FreeNAS / TrueNAS is very resilient and takes hardware changes in stride. I have moved my installation through three different system boards, one Dell and two different SuperMicro boards.

PS. Naturally, you will need to ensure the new system has correctly configured BIOS / UEFI settings so it boots correctly.

 

[Tony Self]

You should be able to move all the drives, boot drive included, over to the new hardware and boot the system. The one problem I expect you to run into is that the NAS OS will not see your NIC, because it is still in the old system, so you will need to plan on accessing the local console to configure the IP address. Once that is done, you should be able to access the web UI to check the system. After setting the IP address, it may take a reboot to get everything to come back up the way it was, but it has been my experience that FreeNAS / TrueNAS is very resilient and takes hardware changes in stride. I have moved my installation through three different system boards, one Dell and two different SuperMicro boards.

PS. Naturally, you will need to ensure the new system has correctly configured BIOS / UEFI settings so it boots correctly.

Thanks Chris, that’s what I was hoping. I am just going through an Ubuntu install just to checkout the hardware. That all seems to be fine so far, so I will try swapping the drives over tomorrow
thanks again for your advice. I will report back later.