My homelab hardware: the HP DL380 G6 breakdown

Every homelab starts somewhere. Mine started with a conversation with a friend in bar who had a server sitting in his garage collecting dust and no interest in running it anymore.

“You want it?”

That’s how I ended up with an HP DL380 G6 — and honestly, it’s been both one of the best and most humbling pieces of kit I’ve ever worked with.

The specs

This is what’s running everything:

At idle it’s only using about 3% CPU and 24% RAM — which tells you just how much headroom there is for running virtual machines and containers. For a homelab workload it’s genuinely overkill, in the best possible way.

The 1TB internal storage handles the Proxmox installation and VM disks. The 16TB comes from a Synology RS814 — a 1U rack-mount NAS that fits neatly alongside the DL380 and handles everything else: backups, media, documents, and anything that needs bulk storage. The RS814 runs Synology DSM and has been rock solid — quiet, efficient, and completely set-and-forget compared to the server itself.

What it’s actually like to live with

Here’s the honest part.

The DL380 G6 is a 2U rack server built for a data centre, not a spare room. It is large, heavy, and it will remind you of its presence constantly.

Noise — it is loud. Not “bit of a hum” loud. Jet engine on startup loud, settling to a persistent fan roar that you learn to tune out if it’s in a separate room. In a living space it would be genuinely unpleasant.

Power draw — it is not efficient by modern standards. This is a machine from 2009 designed when power consumption was less of a concern. Running it 24/7 has a real cost on your electricity bill that’s worth factoring in before you commit.

Size and weight — it needs rack space or a very sturdy shelf. Moving it alone is a workout.

None of this was a dealbreaker for me because I got it for free. But if I’d had to pay for it and account for ongoing power costs, the calculus would look very different.

What I’d buy if I were starting from scratch

This is the question I get asked most often when people see the setup.

Honestly? I wouldn’t buy a rack server at all.

I’d look seriously at mini PCs — something like the Beelink SER5. Small, quiet, power efficient, and cheap enough that you can buy two or three and set them up as a Proxmox cluster. You get high availability, redundancy, and a setup that won’t overheat a small room or double your electricity bill.

The tradeoffs are less raw RAM and fewer PCIe slots — but for most homelab workloads that doesn’t matter. You’re running services, not rendering video.

If you want something in between — more power than a mini PC, less bulk than a rack server — small form factor machines like the HP EliteDesk or Dell OptiPlex are worth looking at. Common, cheap second-hand, and very capable with a RAM upgrade.

What actually runs on it

Right now the DL380 is running Proxmox VE with a handful of VMs and LXC containers:

• OPNsense — the firewall and network brain
• MkDocs — internal documentation
• Various LXC containers for self-hosted services

Current load is minimal — 3% CPU, 24% RAM — which leaves plenty of room to keep adding services without worrying about resources.

The verdict

The HP DL380 G6 is a capable, reliable machine that taught me a lot. Getting it for free made every tradeoff worth it. If I had to pay market rate and cover ongoing power costs, I’d make a different choice.

But that’s the thing about homelabs — the best hardware is the hardware you actually have access to. Start with what you’ve got, learn from it, and upgrade when the limitations actually start to hurt.

Mine haven’t yet.

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Next up: Why I chose Proxmox over ESXi and Hyper-V.