Dell PowerEdge R-Series Reviews

Dell PowerEdge R-Series has contributed to growth and business success, especially in small companies. The complete package we get from Dell makes work easier; it is not just the handling of the devices, but also the support and if there are ever problems. Dell is very well positioned there.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series has specific features that are particularly helpful for small and medium businesses; the flexibility is definitely a big point.

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate Dell support an eight.

For products that are not part of the premium support package, it is a bit more tedious.

Our use cases for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers involve using it as our host for our virtualized environment.

The main benefit is reliability when I think about how a server has been running quietly for four years without even a fan failure or anything like that. Nobody's touched it for half a decade, and it's still running great.

The feature I appreciate the most about Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is the reliability. I have tried other manufacturers and servers both personally and in my job, and it's clear that the Dell PowerEdge offers the best price, performance, and reliability; there's really no contest.

We use a monitoring system, specifically Zabbix, to measure performance metrics with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, which alerts us to high usage and provides metrics on running out of RAM and high CPU usage.

I wish that Dell had a competitive product to the HPE MicroServer because if they did, I would buy them, not in their hundreds, but certainly in their tens, especially in my capacity as an MSP. I sell more HPE MicroServers than any other type of server, and while they're solid, I dislike the external power supplies and the previous generation with soldered and integrated CPUs. I wish there were a Dell solution for $1,000 to $1,500 for small spaces and clients that don't have dedicated server rooms.

I don't have any other points of improvement, but I have a gripe about the way Dell has broken down their storage offerings, making it quite confusing, even for us technical folks, though that falls outside of PowerEdge.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for what feels like my entire career, and it's more than a decade.

I have not seen any instability with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, as they have been absolutely solid. I can only recall one hardware failure over a number of years.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are as scalable as any other server, and when we talk about scalability, it essentially means right-sizing at the time of conception.

I believe Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have features that cater to the needs of SMB organizations, but I wish they had a more SME-oriented small server product that competes with the HPE MicroServer.

We contacted technical support due to a network device failure we had probably four months ago, and even though it was the small hours of the morning, the resolution was quick, and tech support was pretty great, so I have no complaints there. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We have used alternatives to Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, including the HP Enterprise products, and have used all kinds of alternatives. The HPE ProLiant is probably the closest alternative to Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, but the purchase channels and after-sales support aren't quite as easy. There are not many HPE VARs. I prefer the experience of working with Dell partners, as the whole purchasing process with Dell is less time out of my day.

The initial deployment of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is no more difficult than deploying anything else.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers do not require any more maintenance on my end than any other server. 

The pricing for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is on par with everything else at the moment.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers do not play a role in our company's AI initiatives, as anything we're doing AI-wise is all in the cloud, and we're not doing any AI on-premises at the moment. 

I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers a nine out of ten. 

Our use cases for the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers involve reselling the servers to our customers as a Dell VAR reseller, and internally, we use them for our own lab environments, testing, and evaluating the servers for our customers in advance to see how they're doing.

The most valuable feature we find in the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is the iDRAC. We value the iDRAC for its out-of-band management for the servers; servers are servers for the most part, but the iDRAC is the bread and butter of the PowerEdge server series. The ability to do everything through that iDRAC interface is a key for us, allowing us to perform tasks remotely without needing to physically touch anything. Everything can be done through APIs via the iDRAC, making it a very powerful tool we rely on regularly. Its integration into other products, such as OpenManage Enterprise, drives us to use the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers as a whole.

The Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers have benefited our organization greatly since we sell numerous units for our customers. We are working with HPC systems for our customers, and it really is the bread and butter product. Everything starts with compute, and that's the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for you.

The Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are doing a pretty good job; they're moving towards liquid cooling and making it more accessible. The form factor is nice, and they're easy to work on as far as tools and everything.

The licensing of the different formats of the iDRAC is somewhat annoying; I understand why they do it, but if you have the iDRAC license, you should have access to everything. I don't understand why it needs to be sliced into levels such as essential for the bare bones; everyone's going to use Enterprise anyway, so in my opinion, we don't need that many levels of licensing for iDRAC.

I've used the solution for five years now. 

I have not experienced any performance issues with the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers; however, we have experienced downtime. It's usually due to environmental issues in a lab, not due to of the server itself. 

We have had crashes due to hardware failure. The causes for that have been memory DIMMs and hard drives that needed to be replaced. I should note that they've never caused any outages or crashes; they went bad and had to be replaced. Thanks to the redundancy, they didn't cause any crashes that I can think of. 

We've had operating system crashes yet not hardware-based ones. I would assess the overall stability and reliability of the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers as very good; it directly relates to no crashes.

The Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers scale for our company absolutely, as we are a small company.

The Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers don't necessarily cater to small businesses and small-medium businesses; it's usable yet not really catered to. It caters more to enterprises.

I have worked with customer support before. My impressions of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers support specifically are that they are usually fine. I don't need to engage technical support as much as some of the other products because it's straightforward. Usually, it's break-fix type of situations, and that's always pretty easy and responsive.

Positive

I have evaluated other server solutions. We have reviewed HP, Supermicro, and Penguin Computing servers in the past. We go with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers because we are a Dell Titanium partner. We have a long-standing relationship that allows us better pricing and discounts.

The Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are very easy to deploy; it goes right back to the iDRAC, which makes it super easy.

The iDRAC is really the only thing you license on a Dell PowerEdge Rack Server.

We are using blades, multi-use chassis, and rack servers from the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers; no towers. We do use the Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for AI initiatives. In terms of AI usage, we have developed our own AI, such as a large language model chatbot for internal use to import documents and perform tasks. Anything beyond that, we are unable to discuss.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate the product overall a ten.

We are using these servers for our production. We are basically a distance learning university where we have a learning management system, websites, online exams, and a campus management system. All these portals are running on these clusters.

We didn't face many hardware failures. Hardware is very reliable. The performance has been good, with only one or two pieces of equipment failing during the period from 2018 to 2025. Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers helped reduce unplanned production downtime significantly. We have deployed our clusters. In the case of any failure, our virtual machines migrate automatically. We didn't face any major disaster during this period. We faced downtime twice in five to six years, but it was because our cluster was under capacity. We had deployed many VMs on the cluster.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are good in terms of energy consumption.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers are reliable with good hardware quality. During our 5 to 6 years of deployment, we experienced minimal hardware failures. 

In Pakistan, the vendors or the partners of Dell are not providing a good environment. They need to improve their support and hire partners that have certified support sources. Currently, we are not getting good deployment experience. However, after deployment, Dell solutions perform very well.

We have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers since 2018. We deployed the cluster of Dell and VMware in 2018, but we are going to replace this equipment with HPE and VMware.

We're using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers R730. For the backup appliance, we're using Quest. We have also used R410 servers which were replaced with R730 in 2018.

They are very reliable. One or two modules being faulty in five to six years is negligible. The warranty of that equipment expired in 2023, but we are still using it, and we are comfortable with it. The cluster is performing well.

It is scalable as we can add nodes and hard drives to increase space.

Currently, the Dell and VMware solution is in our production, and we are going to replace it with HPE. HPE is a competitor and will hopefully provide us a comfort level.

The deployment of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers was easy.

We are just running a VMware cluster. There is no cloud environment. We are going to deploy a full vCloud foundation environment in our data center on HPE equipment.

I have also received a demo on VxRail, which is an excellent product of Dell. When we deploy VMware on VxRail, those two products are really excellent, and I hope HPE will provide us with the same environment.

These deployments are provided by local partners.

They are affordable. Even during our recent procurement, the cost of Dell servers was lower than that of HPE. However, there were some certificates and vendor issues. We have a partner in Pakistan. The partner didn't have the certifications to meet our requirements. That's why they are out of this tender. Otherwise, the price quoted by Dell was lower than the price quoted by HPE.

It deserves a rating of ten out of ten. It's an excellent product. We are hoping to get a similar experience from our HPE servers.

Our use case for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is that we sell to customers depending on the solution they need. For customers that want typical three-tier architecture, who don't want the FX or VXR rail, they just want to be able to get two, three, five, or ten nodes. Whatever is sold, we go out, install it, and configure it to get it ready for the customer.

I consider iDRAC to be the most valuable feature in Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, which is available everywhere in all Dell products. I prefer iDRAC compared to competitors' solutions, including HP solutions. 

A feature that would enhance Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers is the ability to get multiple servers up and running quickly versus having to do one at a time. Unless I use OpenManage, most customers don't want us to do that. It would be beneficial to have an easier way to get these updated quickly out of the box, even if that means having a tool that lets us run it on our laptops or that I can quickly spin up in a customer environment to push firmware for multiple nodes simultaneously.

When asked about improvements, I find it difficult to suggest changes since the system functions so effectively.

I have been working with Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for three years.

The organizations that install Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers generally have anywhere between 500 to 2,000 people, so it's usually smaller companies I deal with.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers scale with customer needs effectively. 

They're usually used for three-tier, where customers already have either substantial storage or they have other storage platforms that they're bringing in and connecting. Whenever they need to, they can just add more nodes. 

Since it doesn't have to be in a particular rack or even on the same floor in a multi-floor customer environment, they can always place it wherever needed. The ability to put a node wherever they need it is advantageous.

Customer service response for break/fix issues and support documentation for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers has been good thus far. I have concerns with other products, specifically PowerFlex. That said, in general, PowerEdge support has been excellent. My experience with customer service has been positive. When we had a power supply failure out of the box, we called support, and they delivered the replacement within four hours as promised.

Positive

The deployment time for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers varies depending on the customer environment and factors such as cabling requirements and switch proximity. 

After the equipment is racked, stacked, cabled, and powered on, I can typically get ESXi up and running with vCenter and basic operational functionality for up to ten nodes in an eight-hour day.

While I'm not on the sales side and don't necessarily follow up afterwards, I observe that customers who have had Dell products previously often return to Dell for refreshes, which indicates they are seeing return on investment.

I evaluate the price-to-performance of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers as good.

They are not very expensive.

The competitors I have used include Supermicro equipment, HP equipment, and some Lenovo equipment many years ago.

At this time, we're not using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for any AI-based initiatives. 

Our partnership with Dell and what we're able to provide to the customer is valuable. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers a nine.

My use case includes all the production and development workloads, both prod and development workloads.

The most valuable feature, when I compare Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers with other brands available, is the price versus performance, as I get more for what I pay, and mostly, we use this for our CAD workloads. In terms of price-to-performance ratio, I can see at least a 10 to 12% difference when I choose a little cheaper option with Dell compared to others. 

The benefits to my organization are huge because we are a big company, around 100 billion, so that small amount multiplies into something significant. Every year, we buy at least 30 to 70 rack mount servers, and over three to five years, if I calculate it, we save at least 12 to 15X compared to others.

I would improve Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers by making their firmware upgrades easier. 

They do have Dell OpenManage Enterprise, which is easy, but when I am at remote sites, I have to download it locally to apply updates. From that perspective, I want an enhancement for an easier way to download and fix issues.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for almost 12 years.

When it comes to the stability and reliability of the product, we have had a couple of blackouts once or twice, but nothing significant because we operate 24/7 and have a four-hour parsing time. From that perspective, there are no issues.

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers scale to my company's needs. Earlier, we used other blade server products, which had much higher prices and power usage. When we switched to rack mount servers, even with multiple cables and increased network connections, we reduced our power utilization. Any outages or blackouts are limited to particular servers, not affecting the whole chassis or enclosures.

I have used customer service or support for Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. My impressions working with customer support are positive; whenever issues occur, we follow our company policy to fix them, but we still raise them with customer support, and they provide exactly what we need without any problems, especially for Dell servers.

Positive

Besides the price-to-performance ratio, I have not seen any other ROI metrics.

If I had to give advice to someone at another company considering implementing Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers, I would say go for it. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the overall Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers product as a nine.

We have VMware with 2 node servers and almost 20 virtual machines. We have in-house software and an HR and finance application running on it. It works fine for handling diverse applications.

We are using the FX2 chassis, which is a small setup. We have a small environment with very few servers.

Our environment is small, and it fits our environment. For our requirements, it is working fine.

We have protection with secure firmware of Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers. We have not experienced any security incidents or vulnerabilities with our PowerEdge servers.

It reduces our downtime because it has been working fine. There has never been any failure. I have used HPE servers previously, and we had issues related to rebooting, power supply failure, etc. Our Dell PowerEdge Server is working fine. There is no failure.

We use OpenManage Enterprise software. It gives us an advantage in rebuilding a new server. We can build templates and use the same templates to deploy new servers. There is no manual work.

It is a stable server. I have never faced any failure with these servers.  They keep running for at least five to seven years without any issues.

They should reduce its size. Because the CPU power is more now, they can reduce the size of the servers. Currently, we have a 2U server. If possible, they can make a 1U server.

If they can provide more disk slots in one server, that would be good for the environment. Sometimes a BIOS upgrade fails, or something unexpected can happen.

I have used Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers for the last 15 years.

I never faced any failure in the last four to five years. It is a reliable product. Not even one server has failed so far.

We are using the FX2 chassis with two node servers. Two slots are still free. We can add new servers at any time, so the scale-out option is there. The RAM increment option is also there. We can add a lot of RAM there. 

I encountered issues a few times, and they resolved them within the time frame.

Positive

We were HPE customers for ten years. We switched to Dell EMC products about ten years ago. We have VNX storage, xUnity, data domains, tape libraries, and PowerEdge Servers. About 90% of my existing infrastructure is from Dell EMC.

We chose Dell PowerEdge Servers because they are well-known servers. They are the core products of Dell. I love EMC products. They were acquired by Dell. It is almost a similar technology.

Due to built-in software, it is easy to deploy and easy to manage.

When we purchase new servers, partners are responsible for deployment. However, after the initial deployment, it is our responsibility to manage them.

I have tier-one partners like Condo Protego, Cloudbox, GPM, and GBM. We are working with these partners. They have the capability to design the solution, but not all partners are equal.

We did not work with Dell's Professional Services because our environment is not a very big environment. It is an expensive service and not required for our business.

It keeps running and does not create any problems. There are no hardware or power supply failures. It has been good for our business.

We are at an initial stage in our AI journey. We have not tried to run any AI workloads on our PowerEdge Servers. Our business environment is a bit different, and at the moment, we do not require much AI for our business.

I would rate Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers an eight out of ten.

My main use case for Dell PowerEdge R-Series is to deploy a cybersecurity solution for a customer. A quick specific example of how I use Dell PowerEdge R-Series for deploying cybersecurity for my customer is through threat intelligence. Dell PowerEdge R-Series supports intelligence-related cybersecurity by helping to detect cyber threats and react accordingly.

The best features Dell PowerEdge R-Series offers include iDRAC, which allows me to remote in and perform administration. The remote access controller helps me to remote to the server even when the connection is lost.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series has impacted my organization positively as we have been getting more and more contracts from customers because of its reliability. I have noticed improvements in uptime since using Dell PowerEdge R-Series, as the uptime has been reliable, helping us to meet service availability.

The RMA process could be enhanced. There have been circumstances where the heat generated caused the hard disk to fail. I would like to add about the needed improvements, specifically regarding heat management.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for more than 10 years.

Regarding Dell PowerEdge R-Series' AI capabilities, I have had no issues with its governance and security. The accuracy and reliability of output have been good so far and have met my expectations.

Using Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers did not affect the overall flexibility of my operations or business.

I rate customer service as a 4 out of 10.

I have nothing else to add about my main use case or how I use Dell PowerEdge R-Series. That is all regarding additional features. I assess Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers for energy consumption as having no issues. I have noticed that Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers are energy efficient. I am currently running cybersecurity workloads on Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers specifically for threat prevention because I need them for threat prevention.

As a network engineer, I am not very involved with the servers, but I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for three years.

My main focus is on the network side, and those servers are used by different teams for virtualization or cloud computing.

The feature I like the most about Dell PowerEdge R-Series is the graphical interface of iDRAC.

It helps to speed up the process because the servers are very reliable, which has significantly reduced unplanned production downtime.

The most important feedback I have to improve is regarding the prices.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been positive until recently, but the prices increased significantly.

I have been in the industry for almost nine years.

The sustainability goals depend on what we are doing.

The energy consumption of Dell PowerEdge servers depends on the workload, and we monitor them via OpenManage and via different tools from the data center side.

My evaluation of customer service and the tech support side depends on the service requests; some go very smoothly and are finished quite fast, while others take more time.

Before we got Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers, we used multiple servers from different vendors, including Dell, but it is not the only one.

I use HPE as an example of another server that I am using.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been positive until recently, but the prices increased significantly.

We did use Dell PowerEdge R-Series to run AI workloads.

I am not very sure about the benefits of the AI workloads because another team is more AI-based.

I would rate this product 9 out of 10.

The main use case for Dell PowerEdge R-Series is for my tech company where people use it for various purposes, including the tech team and marketing people, so it is not specifically just for day-to-day operations. Marketing people use it, and customer support uses it as well, with no specific limitations.

Our marketing team uses Dell PowerEdge R-Series primarily because the reliability is greater compared to other brands. Being a startup with an entrepreneurship model, the systems we use are Dell only, whether on Mac or Windows. If Windows is used, we use Dell only.

Regarding the main use case and how my teams are using Dell PowerEdge R-Series, it works well and everything is perfect.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series has positively impacted my organization, and everything is fine. It works well with no concerns. As a company, any complaints only come to me, but there are no complaints. It works perfectly and is good.

The reliability of Dell PowerEdge R-Series has made maintenance easier since I have not faced any errors or challenges. Regarding battery life, that is the main focus. Typically in a company, we do not specifically check it, and the compliance is zero.

Using Dell PowerEdge R-Series rack servers has affected the overall flexibility of our operations positively. If any challenges arise, discomfort will only come to me. Nothing so far has been problematic. I am actually using Mac and other things as well, and the experience is good.

In terms of energy consumption, Dell PowerEdge R-Series is good with no issues. The energy power is really good.

For improvements on Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I have no comments since there is no issue.

Regarding what could make my experience with Dell PowerEdge R-Series even better, it currently works well. We have close to 120 units, out of which 30 are Dell, while the remaining are Mac. There are no complaints or concerns. People are working well and the performance is good, and the rest is fine.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for the past six to eight months.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series has positively impacted my organization, and everything is fine. It works well with no concerns. As a company, any complaints only come to me, but there are no complaints. It works perfectly and is good.

The reliability of Dell PowerEdge R-Series has made maintenance easier since I have not faced any errors or challenges. Regarding battery life, that is the main focus. Typically in a company, we do not specifically check it, and the compliance is zero. If Windows is used, we strongly go with Dell.

For improvements on Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I have no comments since there is no issue.

As a procurement manager, I can say we had a lot of Windows prior to my tenure, but after it came to me, we completely shifted to Windows that is Dell. The reason is reliability, and that is the main reason.

I purchased Dell PowerEdge R-Series through a different direct system procurement process.

For deployment, we have a reseller, and we basically have everything vendor-wise. If anything needs to arise, then we will search for the vendor. There is nothing specific about this arrangement.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is deployed in my organization in a hybrid setup, where it is both on-site and in the cloud. Eighty percent is on-site while twenty percent is based on need.

In the hybrid setup, we rarely use the cloud. We work primarily from here, but we might use it once or twice a month, and everything is done with Google.

For improvements on Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I have no comments since there is no issue.

I would rate this product and my overall experience with Dell PowerEdge R-Series a nine out of ten.