HP vs Dell? - Entry Level Server for VM

Po|ygon · 24 Aug 2010 at 16:07

Gurus,

i am inquiring into purchasing a cheap homelab server to help with studying MCITP 2008 Server exams with Hyper V, and plan on fitting 16Gb RAM to utlize a few virtual machines to have a domain, exchange server, ISA etc.

I have narrowed it down to two entry level servers below, I just want to ask the community has anybody else had experience with these particualr servers, and if others have built a homelab for study?

HP Proliant ML110 G6
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/sm/WF25a/15351-15351-241434-3328424-3328424-3984625.html

Dell Poweredge T110
http://www.dell.co.uk/firstserver

Cheers

Po|ygon

FirebarUK · 24 Aug 2010 at 16:13

The ML110/115's are solid and excellent little workhorses. Recommended

TangoSixteen · 25 Aug 2010 at 01:16

I have a mass of ILO2 keys, does anyone know if they will work with the 100i ILO?

I tried one and it didnt want to know...

Since we have so many full ILO2 licences unused, I would feel rather peeved at having to shell out even more to get KVM functionality out of a ML110 G6.

Any tips folks?

Vanilla · 25 Aug 2010 at 01:28

Nothing wrong with either, both capable servers but I always side with HP. It's what most companies I work with do as in general they are miles ahead of everyone else.

Sparky__H · 25 Aug 2010 at 06:09

any thought of knocking up your own from second hand parts?

Quad core q6600 and 8GB ram would do what you want it to do.

FirebarUK · 25 Aug 2010 at 08:40

TangoSixteen said:
I have a mass of ILO2 keys, does anyone know if they will work with the 100i ILO?

I tried one and it didnt want to know...

Since we have so many full ILO2 licences unused, I would feel rather peeved at having to shell out even more to get KVM functionality out of a ML110 G6.

Any tips folks?

No, iLO2 licenses won't work afaik.

JonnyT · 25 Aug 2010 at 10:14

FirebarUK said:
No, iLO2 licenses won't work afaik.

+1

iLO2 Keys will only work with xx300 series servers and above (ML310 G5p and above for towers and DL320 G6 for rackmount)

Luke · 29 Aug 2010 at 08:37

Sparky__H said:
any thought of knocking up your own from second hand parts?

Quad core q6600 and 8GB ram would do what you want it to do.

ESX/ESXi is very picky about what hardware it will run on.
The ML's are great out of the box test servers. I have an ML115 for that very purpose.

Zaf · 1 Sep 2010 at 13:21

FirebarUK said:
The ML110/115's are solid and excellent little workhorses. Recommended

+1 I've got two for testing vmotion

arfur · 1 Sep 2010 at 17:51

I use ML110/Ml115's, I had an issue with Dell a few years ago where it took them a week to replace a faulty hdd in my RAID5 array, had a similar issue with HP which took 24hrs to replace.

ThorpedoUK · 9 Sep 2010 at 21:34

emailiscrap said:
ESX/ESXi is very picky about what hardware it will run on.
The ML's are great out of the box test servers. I have an ML115 for that very purpose.

Disagree, I've ran ESXi 4.1 on all kinds of servers including an old DL380 G4!!

If it were me I would buy the components from here (a six core AMD 1055T would be my first purchase) and use this, it would be a perfect lab and cost half of those servers.

Burnsy2023 · 10 Sep 2010 at 14:40

ThorpedoUK said:
Disagree, I've ran ESXi 4.1 on all kinds of servers including an old DL380 G4!!

If it were me I would buy the components from here (a six core AMD 1055T would be my first purchase) and use this, it would be a perfect lab and cost half of those servers.

It can be very picky about RAID controllers as I recently discovered.

GJUK · 16 Sep 2010 at 16:12

Burnsy2023 said:
It can be very picky about RAID controllers as I recently discovered.

You can buy the Dell Perc 6/i controller for not a lot of cash, ad they do work with ESXi, it what I might end up using for a ESXi home server ;-)

GJUK

BoomAM · 16 Sep 2010 at 20:59

Vanilla said:
Nothing wrong with either, both capable servers but I always side with HP. It's what most companies I work with do as in general they are miles ahead of everyone else.

Agreed.
My new work has all Dell servers. Bag of... tbh.

Zaf · 18 Sep 2010 at 02:12

BoomAM said:
Agreed.
My new work has all Dell servers. Bag of... tbh.

How so?

All of our kit in the UK is Dell over £200K worth and we dont really have any problems at all, I snapped the door off the LTO Tape library doh! and the Dell engineer was on site within our 4 Hour SLA to fix it

We have two site is Paris that uses equivalent HP Kit replicating our UK System... again no problems but I would always side with Dell better Management software by far!

The Drac cards do suck though HP Beats them hands down their

bremen1874 · 18 Sep 2010 at 03:31

BoomAM said:
Agreed.
My new work has all Dell servers. Bag of... tbh.

Almost 15,000 posts and still coming out with what, in most circumstances, would be considered as trolling!

I would be really interested in how HP are miles ahead of Dell, and in which market segment(s)?

I am actually interested, as from time-to-time I do get stuck with spec’ing kit and it’s normally easier to go down the Dell route.

FirebarUK · 18 Sep 2010 at 10:26

bremen1874 said:
I would be really interested in how HP are miles ahead of Dell, and in which market segment(s)?

Blades for one.

Zaf said:
The Drac cards do suck though HP Beats them hands down their

Particularly with iLO3.

Zaf · 20 Sep 2010 at 09:08

FirebarUK said:
Blades for one.

Particularly with iLO3.

If you need a redundant system where fines are in place if it go's down I would never buy blades as you have one point of failure!

Server hardware are pretty much the same if anything Dell Raid cards perform better if you checkout the benchmarks.

neil_g · 20 Sep 2010 at 12:53

dell business support is better than HP business support (in my experience) if that matters to you.

FirebarUK · 22 Sep 2010 at 09:31

Zaf said:
If you need a redundant system where fines are in place if it go's down I would never buy blades as you have one point of failure!

Well that's besides the point and there are ways to mitigate that. I'd imagine you have a cluster.

Zaf said:
Server hardware are pretty much the same if anything Dell Raid cards perform better if you checkout the benchmarks.

You mean the vendor-sponsored-incomparable-product benchmarks?