For the case I actually think it’s a fair price for the product. The problem is the product is not a good fit for the homelab market.

The markup on everything else is absolutely insane though.

Also competing with used gear that is going through e-recycling facilities is going to be hard for them.

They made a good product but missed the mark imo.

What’s your budget?

If you can, spend an extra ~$100 to get at least an R730 imo. You will get more performance and the $100 will pay for itself in power savings in less than 1 year.

Looks like both of your formulas are the same?

To your question: this may be a lot of fun to play around with, but it will costs hundreds of dollars per month to leave on 24/7. For comparison: that power is more than what it would take to blast your AC all month in the summer.

If you search you should see the error only effects a few features and not all of iLO.

And iLO is needed the same way a homelab is needed. sure is nice to have though

Plus hardware pass through makes moving VMs more complicated. More virtual disks and networked storage for everything reasonable

I have not found L2 ARC to be much of a benefit for most of the time.

How many disk bays does the system have and how much storage to you need?

May not be a bad idea to make an HDD pool as large-volume backup target and a an SSD pool for data you want to store and access remotely

buy an ancient/“for parts” 1u 24 port switch and take the guts out. 24 port so you have enough blank space on the face to cut the USB ports

I have used both a lot, and for overall admin I prefer Proxmox.

I have to say XCP really has some niceties to it. The whole thing felt much more snappy to manage VMs than with Proxmox, especially when stopping/starting them.