Planning a replacement for HPE dl360p G8 - need advice

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foshiee

New Member
Jun 29, 2020
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I've had my dl360p G8 a little while now, probably about a year.

ESXi 6.5 U3
2x Xeon E5-2630v2
48 GB RAM
4x 600GB 2.5" SAS HDD
2x 750w PSU

Over the course of the year I've realised that whilst I really like this piece of kit, it's just too loud(whiiiiirrrrrrrrR) and power hungry (last months leccy bill just about floored me) to continue using it as a homelab device (unfortunately I'm very limited on where I can house the lab - it's currently in a nook in the hallway, no attics or basements to hide the shrieking beast in).

It runs various VMs. pfsense, Ubuntu dockerms server (radarr, sabnzbd, etc.), Plex, Ubuntu TIG Stack for monitoring, and a few windows VMs for doze/windows domain administration practice.

What I'm looking for is a couple of quieter, less thirsty machines to replace it with. Here is sorta what I was thinking for the new world order:


Plex will run in ubuntu server on bare metal, I haven't decided on a chassis.
I'm toying with the idea of an R7 3700X, (no Intel QSV tho, hmm..) but need to see how it would cope with a couple plex transcodes at the same time as an av1 encode. (If it can't, perhaps I'll get an Intel Core, Haswell minimum, for Plex and build a dedicated encoding box).
I'll probably make plex transcode in RAM, but I'll want an SSD for the other encodes.
All my media currently sits on my drobo iSCSI in a virtual disk, that is attached to dockerms. Plex accesses the media libraries via NFS. This can stay as is until I fill the drobo.

New ESXi box for the other VMs
OK so for this one I'm aiming for much lower power consumption. I have been thinking about going down Intel Xeon D route. SuperMicro, specifically the SYS-E300-8D or perhaps the E200-8D. That said, I'm concerned about their noise output. I bought the dl360p g8 thinking it wouldn't be so bad - I was wrong. With these also being 1U I kinda expect the same high pitched, small fan noise I'm trying to get away from.
Does anyone have any real world experience here, or could comment on how the noise compares to a dl360p g8? I've heard the mini tower is a lot quiter, but it's also larger and more expensive.


Thanks for reading the wall of text.
That's my loose kinda plan. Utterly open to ideas and suggestions that you think might work better (or cost less lol).

Thaaanks,
foshiee
 
Last edited:

spanky34

New Member
May 5, 2016
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How many VM's you trying to run ?

Might wanna just build a cluster based on the results of Patrick's Corporate NUC project thing he's working on. For Plex, just get a machine with 8GB ram and Intel UHD630 graphics, you should be fine with a solid number of transcodes there.
 
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