HP ProLiant DL320 G6 Rack Intel Xeon E5504 2.00 GHz 3GB DDR3 Server Intel Xeon processor E5504 (2.00 GHz) 3GB (3x1GB) UDIMM DDR3 470065-235

Pros: This is a decent little pizza box for around $1000 — quad core xeon, dual gigabit nics, 9 slots for DDR3 ram, and embedded raid 1/0/1+0 sata controller. Running a few virtual machines on this box on top of Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V pretty successfully.

You just need to be aware of what you’re getting — see cons

Cons: A number of surprises with this box

1) NO DRIVE CADDIES– the server comes without drives, and more importantly without drive caddies. The slots are filled with blanks. Significantly, HP support will tell you they don’t sell drive caddies independently (see other thoughts). Meaning you need to buy the drives already installed in the caddies — a potentially costly issues.

2) No power cord –that’s right, it comes with a cord for a power distribution unit — female receptacle at the end of the cord. No 3 prong cord here.

3) No CD Rom — while the photo shows a DVD drive, there is no drive in this box. Not a huge deal b/c server will boot from a USB stick (thank you UNNetBootIn). Alternately, there is a spare SATA port on the mother board — just note there is no spare SATA power – only a 4 pin molex. You’ll want an external USB drive for install.

Overall Review: Drive caddies CAN BE purchased independently, although they are a bit hard to find. The HP Part # for the caddies is “HP 373211-001”. I was able to find four caddies for ~100 and use the SATA drives I had already purchased.

Pros: This is a great box. I set it up with VMware ESXi and it is running like a champ.

Cons: Doesn’t come with harddrive hotswap mounts you have to buy them separately. Pretty picky about additional ram you add. very unique slot for the slimdvd drive make sure you get the write one i had send back the first one i ordered.