Homelab HP DL320e Gen8 servers?

GodAtum · 19 Oct 2021 at 22:37

I'm looking at renewing my current homelab. Thinking of getting 3 HP DL320e Gen8 servers (which are low noise and power compared to some servers). I'll be using ESXI wih HA and VSAN.

Drives could be Seagate IronWolf 125 1TB SSD, 4 for each server. Are SSDs are much better then 10k SAS for running VMs?

VMs would be a DC, Portainer with ELK and Plex.

Avalon · 21 Oct 2021 at 10:59

HP rack kit generally won’t take a non certified card (may want to check drives) without putting the fans to 100% constantly which is annoying, heck even certified cards for a previous generation result in the same issue, the Gen8 lacks iGPU which for Plex is much better suited for any transcoding work and check the ESXI HCL, a lot has changed. HP paywall for BIOS updates etc. which is mildly annoying unless you have a way round it. SSD’s are several magnitudes better than HDD for heavy IO.

Personally I would question if this could be better achieved on different hardware more efficiently.

andy_mk3 · 21 Oct 2021 at 11:07

Ssd's are biblically better than 10k Sas drives, especially for vm's where iops are essential.

Is rackmount hardware essential for your lab? I recently decommissioned my rackmount hardware and moved over to a couple of Dell Optiplex machines, not only are they much better value to buy with fairly new hardware (9th gen Intel), they're saving me somewhere around £40 a month in electric costs alone.

GodAtum · 21 Oct 2021 at 18:46

andy_mk3 said:
Ssd's are biblically better than 10k Sas drives, especially for vm's where iops are essential.

Is rackmount hardware essential for your lab? I recently decommissioned my rackmount hardware and moved over to a couple of Dell Optiplex machines, not only are they much better value to buy with fairly new hardware (9th gen Intel), they're saving me somewhere around £40 a month in electric costs alone.

Ah right. I currently run everything on one server and am envious of everyone's lab porn on reddit! Electricity cost is an issue but the DL320e apparently only uses around 50-60W compared to my 200W Dell R620.

andy_mk3 · 21 Oct 2021 at 18:53

GodAtum said:
Ah right. I currently run everything on one server and am envious of everyone's lab porn on reddit! Electricity cost is an issue but the DL320e apparently only uses around 50-60W compared to my 200W Dell R620.

That's fair

I had to downsize mine before moving house anyway really. It was very cool having a rack and rackmount servers. But now I have what was using circa 350w condensed into something using 75w with over double the CPU power. They're also so quiet that they're on my desk and I don't know they're on at all.

I'm even more glad I moved them on with engergy prices going the way they are. Rackmount kit is superb, if you don't mind the running costs etc then stick with it. For me though, the pros of having regular desktop hardware outweighed the pros of enterprise hardware, like as mentioned above having an iGPU for plex, and being very open to what hardware you can use, HP can be very fussy to which drives etc that you use, if it doesn't like it then it may not work or run the fans at full tilt constantly.