I picked up one of the Delimiter server blowout specials on the HP DL145, specs as follows:
HP DL145 Dual Opteron, 2GB RAM, 250GB Disk:
- 2 x Opteron 248
- 2GB RAM
- 250GB SATA Disk
- 1 IP Address
- Dedicated Power control (power on/off/reset as required)
- 5TB Bandwidth
- OS: Linux, Windows (you provide the license)
- Gigabit port
Setup took a little longer than the 1-3 business days advertised, at 5 business days, but nothing was mission critical there, so no harm, no foul.
There is no KVM or virtual image support for their DL145s, so if you don't like the available images you're SOL. The image list is something that would have been handy to have as a pre-sale item; I could't find it in their knowledge base.
However, once your server is setup there is a long, reasonable list of available images for provisioning, including:
- CentOS 5.10 (various flavors)
- CentOS 5.9
- CentOS 6 (various flavors)
- Citrix Xenserver 6.2
- Debian Squeeze (various flavors)
- Debian Wheezy (various flavors)
- Fedora 18
- FreeBSD 10 beta
- FreeBSD 8.2
- FreeBSD 9
- FreeBSD 9 rescue
- OpenSUSE 12.3
- OpenSUSE 13.1
- Ovirt Management Server
- Proxmox VE 3.0
- Scientific Linux 6
- Sysrcd (SSH/VNC rescue image)
- Ubuntu 12.04 (32/64-bit flavors)
- Ubuntu 12.10 (32/64-bit flavors)
- Ubuntu 13.04 (32/64-bit flavors)
- Ubuntu 13.10 (32/64-bit flavors)
- Ultimate boot CD
- Ultimate boot CD (memtest86+)
- VMWare EXSi 5.1
Most of those images have additional installation options such as "Install OpenPanel" or "Install Plesk" or "Install cPanel" (I assume with a BYOL, of course).
Provisioning from an image is pretty quick: less than 10 minutes for Ubuntu or Debian (the only ones I've tried).
This is my first Opteron server and while it's certainly no speed demon, it's more than sufficient as a test lab server for various projects for me. Make times are a good deal longer than on similarly setup Intel gear, but I'm still impressed for the price.
Cloning various git repositories was speedy, with average download speeds hitting 10+MB/s (and one of my benchmark D/Ls hit 80.8MB/s). So, network speed is pretty darn good. There is no IPv6, and rDNS entries require a support ticket.
I had an initial issue with the IPMI not working for provisioning, so I created a support ticket and had a response and resolution within 30 minutes. Since then I've contacted support about a couple of other minor things (defaults on their images) and have been floored by the response time and willingness to go above and beyond in an "unmanaged" dedicated environment. I have been averaging something around 15 minutes for a response from support tickets.
I read some of the other posts about the history of the company and past issues, but given the support response I've gotten so far during Xmas week, I'm feeling pretty good about these guys and putting in an order for one of the BL460C's (and will post a further review once that's provisioned).
So far, for $120/yr I can't complain.
Serverbear benchmarks overview:
UnixBench score: 1356.0
I/O rate: 89.4 MB/second
Bandwidth rate: 80.8 MB/second