Hi everyone! So I've been running my home server off of an Asus Z9PR-D12, However, the board has been slowly dying and I'm looking to upgrade to something a little less flaky. I'm leaning towards a Dell PowerEdge R720, I like Dell hardware and their after market/EOL support is fantastic. However, I am seeing HP Proliant DL380p G8 for half of the price of the R720's. I am running two VM's with passthrough's for the video and USB, (Windows 10 and Mac OS Catalina), so I need to be able to add two video cards and two USB 3.0 cards. I know that I can do this with the Dell, but can I do this with the HP's? I have read that the HP's can be techy about the hardware that you install and that EOL support is mostly nonexistent. But saving $100 USD sounds really tempting, that's another 8GB SAS drive that I could drop into the server. Thoughts, comments, philosophical musings? Thanks! zog
Dell all the way for me, the out of warranty drivers, firmware support etc for HP is non existent unless you go hunting FTP sites. I've have Dell T620 2 x socket server I picked up for £200 off a customer when they upgraded last year. It originally shipped in January 2013, and the latest thing I can download from Dell when I enter my service tag is the new ESXi update released 7 days ago. Where as my Microserver, I have to hunt for the most recent service pack ISO for updates.
I have a DL380P Gen 8 and it is loud. Like to the point of turingin it off. However, I solved this with a PWM fan mod. THe next issue you will have is GPU pass through. The standard riser for PCIe cards will not accept a GPU, as you need to buy a specific riser card to fit GPUs. And they cost about the same as the DL380P. Also the on-board SAS Raid card is pants, so I'd suggest a seperate HBA to use which is what I did. Then it's good. Despite these issues it's not a bad server, but the Dell will be a better option and is why it costs more.
As mentioned it's hard to get drivers and firmware for the HP where as the Dell just plug in the service tag and off you go.
