Long story short, I couldn’t figure out how to get the DL380e going again. I decided it was best to just get another because it was so cheap. The new one came in over the weekend and other than some damage to the hard drive cage, it’s working perfectly. I switched the damaged cage out for the good one on the broken server. Set up was fairly easy. I used the HP SmartArray tool to set up two arrays; one single SATA drive for the hypervisor, then six 3TB SAS drives in RAID 6 for my VMs. That gives me 12TB of storage. I got some virtual machines running today, and they’re working great.
One thing I’m not too thrilled about is the power usage. With a couple VMs going iLO reports power usage at around 165 watts. I was hoping for more like 100 or 120 watts. It’s hard to justify that kind of power usage. On the other hand, it’s hard to beat the performance per dollar of a used server. The server itself, processors and memory were around $250, for a machine with 16 cores, 32 threads and 46 GB of memory. I could get something that uses less power, but it would cost more for less performance. My ideal machine would probably be a 16-core Threadripper, but processor and motherboard separately cost more than my whole server. Maybe I can get some used stuff in a few years when it’s time to retire the HP server.