People who follow this blog and my YouTube/Reddit posts might already know that for the past few years I have been running a DL380 G7 at home which I named Danny. the server itself is awesome but when a deal for a DL380e Gen8 came up I could not resist and have now actually moved to everything running on the DL380 including my file server which used to run on a Microserver G7 which was fairly slow CPU wise.
For £90 I got a 16 core server (2x E5-2450L) and 8Gb of RAM. but that RAM was irrelevant as I moved the 40Gb from my G7 into the new G8.
And what a beauty this server is.but you can probably see one of the 2x mods I have done to this server. the HP P420 RAID card that this server came with ran far too hot. I used a 40mm fan on a bracket I bought online to help cool the card down. It is effective at keeping the card below 80c.
The other mod I have done is a modded iLO which adds fan control options. This lets me set the max fan speeds as by default these 12/14 bay models don't let the fans go below 35% even when the thing is running cool. which is very uncool HP(e) but the awesome mod has allowed this server to be used with little fan noise.
The noise is kept even further down as I am using 6x SSD's in total in this machine. 2x in a RAID 1 for the OS and 4x in RAID 5 for the VM's to live. this has improved the performance of many VM's due to the increased disk IO which Windows loves. and for my NAS I literally just moved the 4x 1Tb drives from my Microserver into the DL380e they run far quieter in the DL380e caddys and with improved performance due to the P420 supporting SATA 6gbps whereas the P410 in my Microserver could only do 3gbps.
So far I am very happy with the new server its cut down on power usage by combining 3x servers into 1. and has improved the performance too. Just a shame I had to mod the iLO for the quiet operation but we will see how long that lasts. ultimately I got the server for so cheap it don't worry me if it fails as long as my data is safe.
I also took this opportunity to upgrade to Windows Server 2019 for the host OS which so far has been working better than 2016 did on the G7 but that might just be the faster CPU/SSD's making it feel nicer to use. the dark file explorer is a welcome change that I missed every time I RDP'd into a server.
Would I recommend this server?
The short answer is no. it takes a lot of work to get it running silent due to the 12/14 and 25/27 bay units being forced to run a higher fan speed. but if you come across a steal of a deal for one and dont mind tinkering then this server is truly awesome. just dont expect it to be silent out of the box