A Reddit thread from six months ago. Title: “Running ESXi 8 on DL360 Gen9 – success?” The top comment: “Works fine for a homelab. Don’t do this in production unless you hate sleeping.”
Two weeks later, the Gen9s were racked—not as ESXi hosts, but as dedicated ZFS backup servers running Ubuntu. The new Gen10s purred under vSphere 8, fully green on the compatibility matrix. And Mark? He learned to check compatibility before the purchase order, not after. hp proliant dl360 gen9 vmware compatibility
Subject: DL360 Gen9 + VMware 8 – Compatibility risk A Reddit thread from six months ago
It wasn’t supposed to be a Friday night affair. Mark, the senior infrastructure architect for a mid-sized logistics firm, had promised his daughter he’d be home for pizza and a movie. But at 4:55 PM, the email arrived: “Urgent: New virtualization hosts arriving Monday. Need compatibility sign-off.” The new Gen10s purred under vSphere 8, fully
1. Run vSphere 6.7 (end of support 2022) – security risk, compliance fail. 2. Run vSphere 7.0 (ends 2025) – possible but driver instability reported on the P440ar controller. 3. Return the Gen9s, pay restocking, buy Gen10s – extra $12k, but supported until 2029. 4. Use the Gen9s for non-production (dev/test, backup target) and buy new hosts for prod.