A week ago i somehow managed to buy fully working HP Proliant DL360 G7 with 2x Xeon X5660 and 48GB RAM for 5 euro, and now i dont know what OS to install, because Windows Server 2012 R2 (which i already installed) dont have enough important drivers to work correctly (like ATI ES1000 driver), about Windows Server 2008 R2 i am unsure, and i havent any experience with Linux server operating systems. What is the best system now for that old server?
when I tried to install Debian on hp dl360 g7 with gui, some errors appeared after the login window. but the gui started and worked on proxmox(but extremely slow)
Are you intending on running this as a 24/7 machine?
Keep in mind, these are power hungry processors that don’t idle down particularly well that have overall performance of a potato.
You had mentioned euro in your post which tells me that you likely pay quite a lot for your electric. These machines are dumpster fodder except for occasional use as a learning machine, definitely not worth running 24/7. Especially when a Intel box from the last 5 years will out perform it on significantly less power.
I have the same server and i use proxmox.
https://support.hpe.com/connect/s/product?language=en_US&cep=on&kmpmoid=4091408
Manuals, Downloads, etc
ATI ES1000 is part of iLO if I remember correctly.
Depends entirely on what you want to do with it. Mostly storage with some containers and a little light virtualization? TrueNAS Scale. Mostly virtualization with less robust storage features? Proxmox.
SCO OpenServer
If you’re looking to use it to run some VMs and containers - Proxmox. If you’re going to use it as a NAS - TrueNAS.
If the OP is going to use it as a NAS, OP should get rid of it. Westmere is worthless for a 24/7 server. You’ll pay more for power in a year of running it than what a new machine with better performance would cost.
Proxmox doesn’t come with Linux packages needed for a NAS, like Samba and NFS servers, installed out of the box. There’s also no web user interface for managing NAS functionality. Since Proxmox is based on Debian, the components needed for a NAS can be installed from Debian repositories, but their configuration and management would be through the command line. If you’re considering a virtualized NAS for Proxmox, I suggest looking into Starwind CVM or TrueNAS as a VM option. Both support ZFS.
Unraid, on the other hand, comes prepackaged as a NAS, complete with a web user interface for management. As Unraid is also Linux-based, it offers virtualization capabilities similar to Proxmox, including KVM and VirtIO. A notable difference is in their containerization approach: Proxmox uses Linux Containers (LXC), while Unraid opts for Docker Containers.