Dell PowerEdge R720 Server 2X E5-2690 2.90Ghz 16-Core 192GB H710 (Renewed)

I bought this server to be used as a hypervisor node in a lab's Proxmox cluster. Proxmox installed without any issues and is working beautifully.R720's come in different varieties. Some support 3.5" drives, while others only support 2.5" drives. This is one of the 2.5" drive models. The R720s sold in this listing have 8 drive bays and all are usable and available for drives (in other 8 bay models, only slots 0-3 can be used for drives, while 4-7 are just dummy slots that not usable).The 192GB of memory is only taking up half of the 24 DDR3 sockets, so if you need more RAM, there is plenty of room to accommodate it.These machines are used (renewed, as the listing says) but the machine I got is in great condition. It was well packed, is clean and is not scratched up. Inside, there was no dust to be found.The description says that these machines come with an iDrac 7 Express. I was very please to find that the server I got, had an iDrac Enterprise license installed. I doubt that's the case for all of them, I guess I just got lucky.The one con I would list is the fact that while the servers have eight drive bays, they only come with four drive caddies (and without screws). The seller says there are only 4 caddies so there is no misrepresentation going on and I would have been fine with that if the remaining four bays had been filled with blanks, but that was not the case. The remaining bays were just left empty. Be prepared to spend another $30 for four more caddies. I purchased four of the Maravi Canada 2.5" caddies and would recommend them highly as well.

I use these servers as ESXi hosts, bare metal Kubernetes nodes and Nutanix AHV hosts. They come configured with 12 16GB DDR3 dimms. These can be easy upgraded to 384 GB of ram. They can also be upgraded with e5-26xxv2 cpus for higher core count. The embedded H710 controller supports hardware based RAID 1,10,5 and 6. I crossflash the HBA to OEM Avago/LSI/Broadcom HBAs. This turns it into a 9207-8i adapter. I do this to support software storage solutions like Rook/ceph, VSAN or Nutanix storage (based on HDFS). They servers look brand new and are free of dust. They have been running nonstop for over a year.Highs:16 GB dimms allow for these to be upgraded to 384gb ramIntel or Broadcom nice for great driver compatibility7 open PCI slots for expansion8 pre cables drive baysSupports RAID or HBA mode with re-flashBios and idrac are fully updatedSome come with idrac enterprise

I was impressed when receiving this item. I ordered two of them and they each came with 4 HDD trays and 4 HDD fillers. I was expecting to receive none at all. They also both came with an iDRAC enterprise license.Generally speaking, I was pretty impressed overall.l, especially for the price.However, one thing to note though, if you buy one of these you will need to put hands on: one of the units had not had its CPU thermal paste re-applied. It was old, dry, and flakey. That likely also means that the unit was not entirely cleaned properly, so just make sure to perform an inspection when you receive it.

Used as a hypervisor (Proxmox 8). Ended up putting 8x 256GB SSDs in it. Not sellers fault, but Dell H710 Raid Array is a pain in the neck, only allows hardware raid, cannot mount the drives as independent for software raid with something like ZFS.I use it for everything from a home lab, allows Video Card Passthrough for VMs (note if you use NVidia, you're locked to one per GPU, can't share as you can with an AMD Card).Also has enough umph to handle AI LLM Workloads in a Windows 10 or Linux VM (I have ran Vicuna 13B on CPU only). With 192 GB of Ram and two 8 Core/16 Thread Xeons, there's plenty of resources for many Linux VMs and containers.The largely tool-less design makes tinkering much easier. If you plan to use all 8 2.5" bays, you might have to grab a 4 or 8 pack of WorkDone 2.5" trays. (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0837SWX8Y/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1) . Mine came with 4 available and 4 blanks. I got the 4 back above for $30.I've been running this server for about 6 months now and still works just fine! It was packed well, and came with pretty hefty power cables, 2x 750 watt Power Supplies that check out just fine still.Overall, great buy! If I need another server, will definitely be looking specifically for these guys, as I've read horror stories from other vendors in this market!

The server was well protected in its box upon arrival (kudos for protecting it so well). The delivery arrived on schedule. I'm trying to keep my skills well-honed when between jobs, so I gave myself a project to create a VMware farm at home. Therefore, I need a decent server. Can't afford a new server (because I'm between jobs). This server runs VMWare ESXi beautifully and has plenty of memory to run multiple virtual servers. The only issue I had was a memory issue that occurred on day 2 after setting up ESXi (the server was shut down and rebooted by itself and stuck at the boot step "configuring Memory". I had to pull out all the memory and reseat the memory; then I put in memory a little at a time to see which one was the bad memory. Eventually, I found all of the memory was working (I don't know why I had a memory failure in the first place). So I restarted the server, and so far, everything has been operational for about 3 days now. Now it is performing better than I expected.