Hewlett Packard Enterprise ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus Ultra Micro Tower Server (Xeon E-2224-16GB RAM)

Thing is super small (about the size of a toaster), quiet, has low heat output and has some power behind it, perfect for a home server. Max the ram out at 32G, buy the iLO PCI card and throw some large disks in it and you're set. Be aware support for these servers ends on June 2024 and you should update the firmware for the motherboard and iLO before then. HP's support page is barely usable and they demand you create an account and type in the serial numbers of every one of your products (iLO too) before they will give you firmware / security updates for any devices. Even then, actually performing the update is awful, their website barely functions, the update process requires their brand of specialized tools to work and is a massive time sink. Having run Dell servers for years, I didn't expect the level of support (or lack thereof) to be such a contrast with this manufacturer. Good hardware, awful teeth pulling experience to update anything unless you already run a bunch of HP equipment and have offline archives of all the content that gets taken down and moved around constantly.

This server is a great small footprint server. It had to have the firmware all updated to be able to take Microsoft Server 2022. Once this was done, it worked great. We also purchased the ILO Enablement kit - highly recommended. IT allows you to remotely manage the server. All in all, this is a great little machine.

Home lab in a small bedroom. Not a lot of space. I had a large Dell tower server that needed a hardware refresh. I saw a photo of an AMD processor version of this server on r/Homelab and started a search to find out what it was. It is TINY! My build is ESXi free and 2 VMs of Windows Server 2019 Standard. Zero issues with the build and after two weeks it is humming along. As a bonus, it fits in the bottom of my rack rather than taking up a bunch of extra space in the closet! I highly recommend this box if you are looking for a micro form-factor server.

The server is good for very small offices. The HP ILO5 is great for remote access and monitoring. The ILO expansion kit has to be purchased separately. Excellent quality and performance for a micro server. This server is very limited by the external 180 watt power supply (no redundancy) and only one expansion slot.

It's a very neat alternative to Synology/ QNAP or even DIY NAS given the price and footprint. Ideal for UnRAID or TrueNAS - Compact and good looking - Upgradable CPU and RAM (Need to consider the power budget though) - 1 PCIE slot - 4 x GbE port (+1 management port with iLO enablement kit) - iLO (enablement kit sold separately) - internal USB port - quiet and power efficient operation (UPS measured 12W idle with E2224, 24GB RAM with drives spin down) Cons Pros: - E-2224 option is not powerful enough for VMs - The HPE firmware won't allow to use the iGPU even with G series Xeon or i3 - No M.2 slot - Meaning that you can either choose M.2 SSD adapters or a GPU on the only PCIE slot - HPE quietly removed the PCIE bifurcation support from later BIOS - If you want to use more than 1 M.2 SSD you need those costly adapters with PCIE downstream chip, or some QNAP M.2 + 2.5/ 10GbE adapters - 4 SATA ports only unlike the gen8 where there was an extra for optical bay - PSU is an external 180W laptop power brick, which is quite tight for high core count Xeon with 4 hard drives The screencap is one of my Gen10 plus upgraded to E-2236, 32GB RAM and QNAP QM2-2P10G1TB running UnRAID, it's a shame I cannot use it for Plex transcoding