Hewlett Packard Proliant DL80 Generation 9 is an entry level server with many corners cut to make the price cheaper than the normal enterprise hardware.
Here are a few notes:
-only one Power Supply
-no dedicated ILO port
-eight memory slots, and only four can be used in single CPU configuration
-the base model has no riser cards, and can only use three PCIe cards with a single CPU installed and five with two CPU's.
-there is three? options for adding a riser card(s). One of which is a GPU kit, which includes another fan
-converting to dual CPU's will need at least two more fans, three to make it "redundant". it will operate without have the extra fans but it will complain about it at post and run the existing fans at full speed.
-the built in RAID controller is a B140i. It has two SFF-8087 ("mini-sas") connections and two normal SATA connectors. All of those connectors are controlled by the RAID card. IE if one plugs a single drive into the normal SATA port one needs to go through the HP Storage Administrator and make a RAID0 in order to use it. It only does SATA, SAS is NOT supported. RAID5 is supported! System RAM will be used for cache. Interestingly Windows will see the virtual volume as intended, however my Linux utility, Parted-Magic, as well as the VMware installer, sees all of the drives individually. The card can have it's personality switched to be a standard SATA controller.
-The standard backplane is four port, despite there being 8 drive bays. One can just add a 2nd four port backplane, the physical retention is there as is a second special power lead. There also appears to be a single 8-bay option. The standard backplane also claims to be not hot-swappable, I am not sure if that is because of the B140ii controller or the back plane. Speaking of drive bays, the 3.5" bays do not have any LED indicators. The backplane is connected to the system board via a SFF-8087 connector (at the motherboard end) to a four port SATA break out cable to the four ports of the backplane.
I ordered a HP 790487-001, which is said to work for the DL60, DL80, and DL120. This four port SAS/SATA backplane differs in that it has a SFF-8087 connector and little "fingers" to operate the LEDs for the drive sled.
-VMware ESXi v7 does see the storage and the network cards. However where as Windows does recognize RAID logical volumes, ESXi does not. In this case a four drive RAID5 was setup, and VMware only sees four individual drives.
Original backplane on the left, upgraded one on the right
Notice the "fingers" to operate the drive sled LED's
Both backplanes installed, note the SFF-8087 isn't installed yet.