As i mentioned in an earlier post, most of the people with the gen6/7/8 microservers have been consumer focused - seems quite typical for a home NAS set up of some sort. There's literally zero money in it for HPE in this market, selling support contracts with the product etc is where the profit it made. That's why i suspect the gen10 version has been made more towards the SMB market.
Yes the missing onboard iLO is quite a downer, i suspect the decision was made based on the fact that these are not the type of servers you'd find in a data center, so if they're in an office, it should be relatively easy for someone to power them on/off etc.
I'm sure they sell iLO cards that can be plugged in, so that might be an option for anyone who does need one (don't quote me on that though).
It's clearly an entry level product aimed at branch offices and the S of SMB with overspill into the home market which is probably why HP keep producing them as they're like tribbles (I own 4). Technically it's a backwards a step, the loss of a socketed CPU and iLO are going to be genuinely unfortunate as the attraction with a Gen8 was it's ability to be purchased cheaply and upgraded as your needs grew. That said it's an OK little CPU from what i've seen and more than capable of the traditionally lighter workloads a branch office or small office based SMB/higher end home user has (NAS/a few light services/the odd VM). Part of the business case for the Gen8 was it's low purchase price, certification and proven reliability and the option of upgrading the CPU if you needed something more substantial in the future, just like getting a full iLO licence.
As a home user I keep looking at alternatives to my current collection, I would prefer a larger number of disk's in my Un-RAID pool and options range from a budget friendly £100 Node 804 with 10 x 3.5" drives and a pair of SSD's for cache running with LSI HBA to a Lian-Li 343B for some 30 drive goodness and 6x 5 in 3 backplanes, but the case is £350, the backplanes £95-135 a pop and i'd need 6, if i'm spending that sort of money i'd probably get a decent board and at least an i5 or i7 and run *everything* on it knowing it's not going to have any issues with PAR repairs while transcoding and torrenting etc. Then I looked at the Gen7 sat next to me using bugger all power and remembered why I like them. Small, quiet, frugal, more than capable of file server workloads and easily capable of running docker instances/VM's for most things I want to use. OK the CPU isn't that quick at PAR/RAR work and transcodes are out of the question, but that little box holds 7 drives and cost less than a single backplane and barely more than the cost of a case. Genuinely tempted to pick up a Gen8 cheap now as at least I can shove an i3 in now and an e3 in later,