Homelab HP DL320e Gen8 servers?

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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.

 

[GodAtum]

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.