PCSP News: Server & IT Hardware Insights

HPE ProLiant Generations Explained: Gen8 to Gen11 (2026)

Posted by Konstantin Protasov, PCSP on Oct 6th 2026

HPE does not publish an open end-of-life date for a ProLiant server. Its end-of-life notice for the DL360 and DL380 Gen10 is a Product Change Notification behind an HPE Support Center sign-in, under a title marked “(Revision)”; what was revised is behind the sign-in too. What H … read more

Hyper-V vs Proxmox vs ESXi: What Licensing Costs in 2026

Posted by Konstantin Protasov, PCSP on Oct 5th 2026

Comparisons of Hyper-V, Proxmox and ESXi usually price the hypervisor. On a used two-socket server the hypervisor is the cheap part. The bill is set by what runs inside it, and by a number fixed the day you bought the box: how many physical cores it has. Microsoft counts cores … read more

Server Decommissioning Checklist 2026: Wipe, Sell, Recycle

Posted by Konstantin Protasov, PCSP on Oct 2nd 2026

Server decommissioning checklists lean on two phrases: wipe the drives “to NIST 800-88”, or run a “DoD 5220.22-M” overwrite. The first changed a year ago, and the change retired the second. NIST published Revision 2 of SP 800-88 in September 20 … read more

Dell PowerEdge Generations Explained: R620 to R760 (2026)

Posted by Konstantin Protasov, PCSP on Oct 1st 2026

Dell does not publish an end-of-life date for a PowerEdge server. Asked on Dell’s own forum, a Dell community moderator answered on August 24, 2023: “There isn’t any documented information for End of Life and End of Support Life on PowerEdge servers.&rdqu … read more

iDRAC, iLO and IPMI Explained: Logins, Licenses, Firmware

Posted by Konstantin Protasov, PCSP on Sep 30th 2026

iDRAC, the integrated Dell Remote Access Controller, is the management computer Dell builds into every PowerEdge server: a separate chip with its own firmware and network address that lets you power the server on and off, read its sensors and update its firmware over the netwo … read more

Best Workstation for CAD in 2026: AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Revit

Posted by Konstantin Protasov, PCSP on Sep 29th 2026

AutoCAD 2027 lists Windows 11 as its only operating system, and its minimum memory doubled to 16 GB. Revit 2027 and Inventor 2027 dropped Windows 10 too, and Dassault’s own table marks it “no” for SOLIDWORKS 2026 and 2027. For anyone shopping fo … read more

Cisco UCS Explained: CIMC, UCS Manager EOL, M4 to M6 (2026)

Posted by Konstantin Protasov, PCSP on Sep 28th 2026

On September 15, 2026, Cisco put an end date on UCS Manager, the software at the center of its Unified Computing System since 2009. The end-of-life notice for release 6.0 stops sales on December 31, 2027 and support on December 31, 2030; the older 4.3 line ends s … read more

What to Run on Proxmox in 2026: Helper Scripts, LXC vs VM

Posted by Konstantin Protasov, PCSP on Sep 25th 2026

Correction, October 2, 2026. Proxmox’s ZFS cache rule of thumb, 2 GiB plus 1 GiB per TiB, counts available storage, not raw disks, and neither it nor the installer’s default reserves memory: both are ceilings. The first version of this article applied the … read more

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