HPE ProLiant Compute DL345 Gen12 review: A truly EPYC single socket rack server

We were mightily impressed with HPE's ProLiant DL345 Gen11 rack server when we reviewed it a couple of years ago. And its successor, the ProLiant Compute DL345 Gen12, builds on its successes. Support for one of AMD's core-heavy Gen5 EPYC 9005 series CPUs keeps the focus firmly on virtualization duties, but it goes further with a doubling of DDR5 memory to 6TB, making it a fine candidate for memory-intensive applications.

HPE is offering an appealing alternative for businesses unhappy with VMware's revamped licensing plans, as the DL345 Gen12 is available with its Morpheus VM Essentials software. Designed to simplify virtualization, its unified management plane can handle its own HVM KVM-based hypervisor clusters along with existing VMware vSphere deployments.

HPE boldly claims its per-socket licensing model can reduce the cost of ownership by up to 90%. You can try it out too, as HPE offers a free non-commercial community edition with a one-year licence for three sockets.

The server's 2U chassis also provides an extensive range of storage features. As you'll see, it can't match the enormous capacities of the DL345 Gen11, but it still has plenty of potential for storage-centric workloads.

HPE ProLiant Compute DL345 Gen12 review: Storage features

There are two specific reasons why storage capacities for the DL345 Gen12 aren't as high as those offered by its predecessor. The DL345 Gen11 has internal midtray and rear drive options, allowing it to support a total of 20 LFF or 32 SSF drives, but these are not available for the DL345 Gen12 – presumably due to the thermal restrictions imposed by the higher TDP Gen5 EPYC CPU.

The good news is the triple-box design at the front of the DL345 Gen12 offers plenty of storage choices with a sharp focus on EDSFF SSDs. Each box supports up to twelve E3.S NVMe SSDs for a total of 36, but the flexible design means you can partner them with standard SFF boxes or a universal media box with two stacked SFF bays and an optical drive.

There are other choices as our system came with one 8-bay SFF box with direct-attached U.3 NVMe SSDs, while its central box sports HPE's NS204i-u V2 boot optimised storage device equipped with a pair of mirrored hot-plug M.2 NVMe SSDs. This multi-purpose box can partner the boot device with two blocks of four EDSFF drives, or you can use one block to present two front-mounted PCIe Gen5 OCP cards.

If it's capacity you're after, the server offers up to twelve SATA/SAS LFF drive bays, or you can sacrifice the top four and replace them with HPE's universal media bay. As with all AMD servers, there is no embedded software RAID, although you can direct-attach SATA devices, which will operate in AHCI mode, and HPE offers plenty of PCIe and OCP 'MR' RAID controllers.

HPE ProLiant Compute DL345 Gen12 review: Remote management

All the latest ProLiant servers come with HPE's iLO7 remote management controller, which is implemented in the DL345 Gen12 as an OCP-compliant DC-SCM (data center secure control module) board. Platform security and supply chain integrity are at the top of its agenda, along with silicon root of trust (RoT) digital firmware fingerprinting, the iLO7 provides protection against next-generation quantum computing threats and HPE's Secure Enclave – a physically tamper-resistant security processor for storing sensitive data.

The iLO7 presents a smart web interface that's been designed around workflows with the customisable home page dashboard presenting up to six cards for at-a-glance status views of key areas such as host health and security issues. Each card has colour-coded icons for each component so you can easily see if anything needs your attention and hot links are provided for drilling down for more information.

We run HPE's OneView in the lab on a Hyper-V host and had no problems importing the DL345 Gen12 for on-premises management and monitoring. The iLO7 also connects directly to HPE's GreenLake Compute Ops Management (COM) cloud service, which provides a complete overview of your server estate plus tools for server deployment and management, automated system lifecycle compliance, and AI-powered insights.

HPE ProLiant Compute DL345 Gen12 review: Build, cooling and expansion

Cracking the lid reveals a very tidy internal design and, unlike the Xeon-powered DL340 Gen12 we recently reviewed, all the cabling is neatly arranged and secured out of harm's way. The 64-core 3.3GHz AMD EPYC 9575F CPU in our air-cooled system is looked after by a high-performance heatsink with radiator extension bars.

Lower specified systems can use HPE's standard cooling fans with our system, including a full house of six hot-plug high-performance fan modules. HPE offers its DLC (direct liquid cooling) kit for this server, but not its nifty closed-loop liquid cooling system, which is currently only available for the DL320, DL325, DL36,0 and DL560.

Expansion potential is excellent as there's room at the rear for two three-slot risers that support full-height, half-length PCIe Gen5 cards. Lurking beneath are two OCP 3 PCIe Gen5 slots, which support HPE's 'o' RAID cards and a good selection of network adapters, with our system kitted out with HPE's quad-port Gigabit and dual-port 25GbE modules.

The DL345 Gen12 expands GPU support further over the Gen11 model as it can take six 75W single-width (SW) or four 400W double-width (DW) cards. HPE's front enablement kit provides four or two full-height, full-length PCIe 5 slots for DW GPUs and there's space in between them for a central box for EDSFF or SFF storage devices.

HPE ProLiant DL345 Gen12 review: Is it worth it?

The core-dense Gen5 EPYC CPU and huge memory capacity makes the ProLiant Compute DL345 Gen12 a very affordable solution for virtualization hosting and many other demanding enterprise workloads. It won't beat the previous Gen11 model for storage capacity, but it does deliver a highly flexible range of options, brings HPE's smart iLO7 management into play and has a remarkable expansion potential with a high GPU support.

HPE ProLiant DL345 Gen12 specifications

Chassis 2U rack

CPU 64-core 3.3GHz AMD EPYC 9575F

Memory 768GB 6,400MT/s ECC DDR5 Smart Memory (max 6TB)

Storage bays 8 x hot-swap SFF (max 24 with three boxes)

RAID None included

Storage included 4 x 3.2TB direct-attach U.3 NVMe SSDs

Cooling 6 x high performance hot-plug fans

Network 4 x Gigabit OCP, 2 x 25GbE OCP

Expansion Up to 6 x PCIe Gen5 slots, 2 x OCP 3 slots

Power 2 x 2,400W Titanium hot-plug PSUs

Management HPE iLO7, OneView, GreenLake COM

Warranty 3Yrs On-Site NBD