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.”
He typed the model into the compatibility matrix. The page loaded slowly, as if hesitating to deliver bad news.
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.” hp proliant dl360 gen9 vmware compatibility
He opened three more tabs:
Mark leaned back. The refurbished Gen9s were a bargain—$800 each instead of $5,000. The CFO had practically hugged him. But now, reality. It wasn’t supposed to be a Friday night affair
A VMware community post from a user named “StorageGuy_42”: “Gen9 + ESXi 8 = random PSODs (purple screens of death) during high queue depth. Found the issue? Out-of-tree driver for the Smart Array P440ar. VMware won’t backport. HP won’t write a new one. Dead end.”
Subject: DL360 Gen9 + VMware 8 – Compatibility risk Need compatibility sign-off
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.
Recommend option 3 or 4. Cannot sign off on option 1 or 2 for production.