Dell PowerEdge R-Series Reviews

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is primarily used in environments where startup organizations need to build a mini data center on-premises. Dell PowerEdge is the right fit for most organizations.

The computing power and the flexibility around building the server itself are the features I appreciate most with Dell PowerEdge R-Series. You can work around the number of cores depending on the needs of the customer. Understanding exactly what the customer wants to achieve is essential.

Dell PowerEdge servers have absolutely helped to reduce unplanned production downtime. The reliability and uptime are incredible. One of the interesting aspects about Dell PowerEdge R-Series is that our customers keep coming back, even when they want to do a refresh, because they know it is a reliable system.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series affects the overall flexibility of my operations because it is flexible. You can tailor it towards your needs and customize it according to requirements.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series has absolutely helped reduce Total Cost of Ownership because the upfront investment can be recovered in less than a year or two. The server continues to run and serve while performing optimally. You can also perform some upgrades.

I think Dell PowerEdge R-Series can support more storage capacity, which would be great. Most other OEMs are trying to ensure you have a one-stop shop for just one server where you could get a whole lot in terms of CPU power, memory capacity support.

They add the memory and the processing power of the server. This also has to do with the cost of the server itself. I think Dell needs to look into this depending on the region. I am from the Europe, Middle East, and African region, and the cost of this server sometimes is a limiting factor for some of our customers who really want to have Dell PowerEdge R-Series running in their environment. Because it does not fit into their budget due to inflation and economically global changes, a lot of people are trying to cut down on budget, but they still want the best. How can you make it affordable for end users?

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series for a very long time, more than four or five years.

Dell PowerEdge servers have absolutely helped to reduce unplanned production downtime. The reliability and uptime are incredible. One of the interesting aspects about Dell PowerEdge R-Series is that our customers keep coming back, even when they want to do a refresh, because they know it is a reliable system.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series affects the overall flexibility of my operations because it is flexible. You can tailor it towards your needs and customize it according to requirements.

In terms of evaluating the customer service and tech support that comes from Dell, I would say it is incredible. Dell has done something wonderful for themselves in terms of enabling and empowering their partners in competency and certification to support their product without escalating to Dell. We hardly escalate any issues on Dell PowerEdge R-Series to Dell or open a ticket. From my company, we resolve anything Dell PowerEdge R-Series-related issues. Through the empowerment of training, competencies, and certifications, we have a team that is well-equipped to represent Dell when it comes to Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

Prior to adopting Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I grew to meet the R-Series in the industry. I have encountered R730, R740, R750, and R760. At the Dell Technology World 2026, I am seeing R770, which is something I have always known.

Currently, we are not running any AI workloads on Dell PowerEdge R-Series right now, but it is coming. It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when. My overall rating for this product is 8.5.

Our main use cases involve Kennedy Krieger as a nonprofit that is the intersection between healthcare, education, and research. We do a lot of patient care, patient research dealing specifically with kids with special needs.

A good example of how these features have benefited our organization is whenever we have a vulnerability that we're dealing with at the firmware level. We keep our environment all the same, unified, with the exception of some of our older legacy servers. Upgrading the firmware or dealing with patching and CVE management is so much easier with Dell's BIOS software, which takes just five or six clicks. It's easy and efficient, and my team can get it taken care of within the span of a couple of hours, compared with some of our other legacy systems where it takes considerably longer than that.

Absolutely, it's helped us reduce unplanned production downtime. We have a lot of different use cases in our environment because we have medicine and research. Researchers tend to be attracted to the shiniest thing of the day. Trying to fit everything into what they need, into one particular type of node, we've been able to do that pretty well.

I like the BIOS management the most with Dell PowerEdge R-Series. We have a single pane of glass across all of our different nodes, so it's easier to manage. I do enjoy that we have the AMD processors and appreciate the efficiency that it offers us and the versatility. We were previously a Broadcom VMware shop. We've transitioned over into Nutanix, and we've been able to make that migration very easy. We really appreciate that.

I think that power is an issue with everybody. We just had to expand our power footprint in our data center to accommodate. It's the nature of the beast, and while I don't see specific positive gains, it's no worse than everybody else who's dealing with the same problem.

I was most surprised by the increase in power consumption across all of them because we're dealing with AI workloads and they're a lot more powerful. We doubled in PDU size, which caught me by surprise. I would love to lower that, though I don't know if that's even possible. It puts a strain for small nonprofits like ours where we have a small footprint. We don't have enough money or real estate to expand if we need to.

I rate Dell PowerEdge R-Series as a solid eight on a scale from one to ten. There's always room for improvement, especially on the power and cooling perspective, because AMD tends to run a little bit warmer than an Intel processor. Other than that, it does what we need. At the end of the day, that's all we're looking for. We need to make sure the lights are blinking.

I have been using Dell PowerEdge R-Series in my job for about eight years now.

We have a pretty good group of technical professionals on my team, so fortunately, we have not had to deal with the customer service and tech support side of Dell in that regard.

Prior to adopting Dell PowerEdge R-Series, we had a TSM tape library, we had some Cisco nodes, and all that. Pricing and the relationships that we have maintained with our Dell partners helped me transition. We're also a Dell workstation shop. We have manifested a really good partnership and they've gone the extra mile to make sure we're taken care of. The relationship is the important thing.

My experience regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been good. I think that our biggest cost factor with everybody in the industry is the cost of licensing for hypervisors. Whether we're talking about Broadcom VMware, which skyrockets with licensing, or Nutanix, which is a little bit better but still high, the hardware is the least of our concerns from a pricing perspective.

We're a nonprofit and I think that it's always a good thing when we can get to the end of our hardware lifecycle without having to repair, which is how I would describe ROI with Dell PowerEdge R-Series. We have not had much of an issue with replacing parts or high failure. That's always a good thing.

If I have a few words of advice to any organization that's considering Dell PowerEdge R-Series, it's important to always do your research. It's always important to take stock of your workload specifically. It's never a one-size-fits-all scenario. Take time to genuinely and realistically evaluate your existing workload so that you don't underpower, especially as AI takes a broader stance in your environment. Those power requirements and compute requirements are leapfrogging at an exponential level. Make sure that you're accounting for today's workload and what you anticipate or what you can ballpark three years down the line. Make sure that you spec it correctly the first time, and whatever you're doing, make sure you have room for the proper expansion later on. I would rate this product an eight out of ten overall.

We primarily use our Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers for virtualization. In practical terms, they host all of our virtual machines, ranging from our Active Directory infrastructure and file servers to our various business applications.

It has significantly improved our operations. The feedback has been great, mainly because we’ve experienced very few outages—which is critical for us—and the administration is both simple and effective.

What sets Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers apart is Dell’s strong commercial approach compared to HPE; that is often the deciding factor for us. When you combine that with their solid build quality and competitive pricing, they really stand out. The management tools make our lives much easier as admins—if we had to choose again, there's simply no contest.

To suggest improvements, I would need more experience with other vendors. Aside from HPE, I lack a broad enough benchmark for a true comparison. While there is room for optimization—where PowerEdge could certainly help—it would require some development work to fully leverage the hardware.

I have been using these Dell servers for five or six years, so they are going to reach the end of the warranty soon.

I wouldn't say it's completely issue-free; maybe a few alerts a month triggered by updates, but overall, the tools offered and the whole ecosystem provided by Dell allow us to monitor all our infrastructure and alert us in case of issues.

I think it adapts to the growth of my company absolutely, as the solution we chose from Dell is a scalable offering that fully meets our needs.

Directly, I have not needed to contact customer support, but my colleague has called Dell very rarely.

Positive

Before adopting Dell, I knew HPE from my previous company, with my current company we had decided to switch to Dell with PowerEdge, and we were very happy with the choice we made, as we had no issues in terms of administration, management, and performance.

Compared to equivalent HPE solutions, the primary differentiator for our company is the more competitive pricing.

We do the deployment of Dell PowerEdge R-Series directly with Dell, and we have a Dell engineer who comes to set up the infrastructure, we do it together, but he configures the whole system for us.

We do the deployment of Dell PowerEdge R-Series directly with Dell, and we have a Dell engineer who comes to set up the infrastructure, we do it together, but he configures the whole system for us.

I can say that I have seen a return on my investment.

The pricing is comprehensive, covering both the hardware and the necessary licenses. Of course, I wouldn't say that all products are identical; while a server is a server at its core, the details matter.

Before adopting Dell, I knew HPE from my previous company, with my current company we had decided to switch to Dell with PowerEdge, and we were very happy with the choice we made.

I would give it a 9 out of 10. While I considered a perfect 10, I prefer to give a 9 to leave some room for improvement, as no solution is ever truly perfect. My main advice to others is to look closely at the value for the money; the combination of competitive pricing and reliability is what really stands out for us. This consistent performance is why I’ve given it such a high overall rating.

My customers are currently running workloads on Dell PowerEdge R-Series that are primarily VMware for virtualization, for host application, and more on application.

The main reasons my customers haven't run AI workloads on Dell PowerEdge is that they are not using it, but they are considering it in the near future because their workload is only virtualization and applications. There is no need for AI for now, but perhaps in the near future, they will consider AI.

I find the lifecycle features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series most valuable because you can find the monitoring, the update, and upgrade. It's easy to use.

Dell PowerEdge has positively impacted my customers' organizations.

The benefits they have seen from using Dell PowerEdge R-Series are that it is more resilient and has strong security. The versatility and the capabilities and features of the device are awesome.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series can be improved on the cost if they can lower the price, and of course, more security.

If it doesn't suit the budget, I usually recommend going with the HP brand instead of Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

It would be even better for Dell PowerEdge R-Series to have integration with the lifecycle with the iDRAC so that it will be easy to use during the configuration, update, and upgrade.

I have been working with Dell PowerEdge R-Series for more than three to four years.

In terms of the downtime, there is no problem with Dell PowerEdge R-Series because in our experience, there has been no downtime. In fact, over three to five years, there has been no downtime.

For stability, I would rate it as a ten.

Dell PowerEdge R-Series is scalable.

From one to ten, I would rate its scalability as nine.

I would rate their technical support as awesome. There is no problem with technical support. You can go to the website for support, and then they will do the rest. You just put in the serial numbers, and if you're still within the warranty, you have no problem with it.

For technical support, I rate it as a ten.

For the initial setup or the deployment of Dell PowerEdge R-Series, there is no problem because you will use the iDRAC. If you have the monitor and keyboard, there is no problem because it is straightforward and easy to use.

To implement the basic configuration of Dell PowerEdge R-Series, it takes only ten to fifteen minutes.

Using Dell PowerEdge R-Series has affected the overall flexibility of my customers' operations and business positively, and overall, I would rate it as a ten.

For energy consumption, I think Dell is certified with the green tag or environmental compliance. There is no problem with Dell. They comply with environmental compliance and the green initiatives for global warming.

There may be a cost to running AI workloads on Dell PowerEdge R-Series, but for easy and proactive troubleshooting, the AI will solve the problem on behalf of the users. There is no need for a skilled technician to troubleshoot because there is an AI on their behalf.

I am still working with Dell PowerEdge R-Series products, but I focus more on presales.

My customers purchase Dell PowerEdge R-Series from a third party when it comes to upgrading with HCI, the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure.

My overall review rating for Dell PowerEdge R-Series is 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.

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.

Our primary use cases for this solution include having our ESXi installed on the system on Dell PowerEdge R-Series, and we have VMs, Windows VMs, and Linux VMs.

We have a lot of Dell-oriented products. The company uses it extensively.

It's a very popular platform and everything is publicly available. 

From using Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I've seen benefits in that it's a very popular platform, so we have a lot of information online. If we have something, we don't need to wait for support; we can just Google everything and it's online.

The response from our end-users give us feedback that is positive. 

The upside of Dell solutions over its competitors lie in their support; they are spread across multiple vendors in Israel, and we are really pleased with the support we're getting from the Dell provider we're working with. The Dell provider that we work with is One Teldor.

To make it a better solution, we need more automation. I might be lacking knowledge, and there may be automation solutions available for regular day-to-day usage, such as running the VMs on Dell PowerEdge R-Series. If there were an automation solution for things such as cleanups, automatic reviewing of the data source and storage data, and providing more insights on what's needed, that would be necessary. I'm referring to automation scanning of the system and providing insights on how to improve the system.

Over the years, we've needed more RAM storage, requiring us to purchase more solutions. We need them to allow for more extension of RAM.

I am working in the company for eight years and since I've been there, Dell PowerEdge R-Series solutions have been there for a very long time. The company has used it for maybe 15 years.

I find the stability and reliability of Dell PowerEdge R-Series to be high; on a scale of one to ten, I'd say a nine.

An example where Dell PowerEdge R-Series made a noticeable improvement is that we have a problem with the system being limited in storage and RAM. 

Over the years, we are developing stuff that requires more RAM usage or storage, and we cannot expand the current VMs on the current Dell PowerEdge R-Series, so we need to purchase additional solutions aside from it. For instance, we've purchased the Storage MD recently to expand the storage size, and regarding RAM, we're just limiting the people on what they can do on the local VMs.

We're a global company. In Tel Aviv, we have 34 employees, and globally, we have almost 300 employees. 

If I would give the customer support a rating on a scale of one to ten, I'd give them an 8.5 as there's always room for improvement. They should improve on pricing with better discounts.

Positive

Since I've been in the company, we've only used Dell PowerEdge R-Series and their products.

Usually, we replace the old Dell PowerEdge R-Series with a new one. We have a VMware solution for three ESXi; we're not expanding for more ESXi, we're just replacing older machines with new versions of Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Dell PowerEdge R-Series is that they are average to the market. They're not too cheap, however, also not too expensive compared to other solutions.

When I mention other solutions, I refer to those offered by other companies. We have offers from HPE, but the vendor wasn't available too much, and we were afraid to switch because of the service we got from HPE, so we stayed with Dell. Besides HPE servers, we considered migrating everything to the cloud, but because of the prices for having the developer systems on cloud, we decided to stay for the development stage on-prem while migrating the production to the Azure environment.

We used to work with the Tower, however, now we have the Rack. The Rack servers we're using are R740 and R7 something.

There's no special feature I particularly prefer about Dell PowerEdge R-Series; we're just very oriented with Dell devices. We have the servers, laptops, screens, everything Dell oriented. I'm just going with what was before I came to the company. I'm guessing the previous person in my position worked with Dell, probably because he had a connection, got good prices, and the vendor was very helpful, so we continue working with Dell.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate this solution a nine.

My role in using or managing Dell PowerEdge R-Series is that I'm basically the HPC administrator, so my role is installing and taking care of applications on the HPC platform. We basically do rack maintenance and handle the software and application installations and maintenance on Dell PowerEdge R-Series servers.

While I'm not exactly clear about the features of Dell PowerEdge R-Series that are most valuable since it has been quite recent since I've used it, the Dell solutions have been helpful. The solutions from Dell PowerEdge R-Series are quite quick and targeted in the sense that they are more precise to the problem we're facing. The response times are also quite quick. In our organization, the team which is actually taking care of the HPC solutions consists of around six of us. The company as a whole is quite huge; it's a university with around 2,000 plus employees.

The solutions from Dell PowerEdge R-Series were targeted and quite quick, which was helpful. However, I think the approach towards the solutions could be improved. I realized during the session that we had a lot of back and forth before we finally arrived at the solutions. If this could have been made quicker or if there was a more convenient platform for discussions, it would have been much easier for us. I know another solution could be having a Dell engineer visit to look at the equipment, but if there was a quicker method, such as a video call to scan through the equipment and see what's happening, that might have worked better.

From my one instance with Dell PowerEdge R-Series, I find it targeted and quick, which makes me happy with its approach. For cases concerning applications or network arrangements, those can be solved quickly by sharing error reports. However, if it's something related to hardware, it could be improved; if there was a platform or solution that hastened that process, it would have been better.

I have been working in the current field for about a year and six months.

Regarding the stability and reliability of Dell PowerEdge R-Series, they have been quite reliable based on my experience and the support has been pretty good.

Currently, as we are expanding our resources, I think this will also include more customers and large scale resource utilization. Therefore, I would say that Dell PowerEdge R-Series will scale with our increasing hardware needs as with software support. I expect that when we scale this to a larger platform, it will be more helpful, especially since we will encounter more frequent cases, and based on the response time we experienced, I believe it will be equally helpful.

We haven't had many of these issues lately. I would rate Dell support around eight because they have been quite quick in their response and providing solutions. One of the cases was when one of the servers had a fault in it, and we couldn't figure out what the issue was. It was a GPU machine generating a lot of noise and heat. We tried everything that we could do from our side, but it really didn't work out. Later, we asked for Dell support, and then we figured it out. It took some back and forth discussions, but it ultimately turned out that one of the fans was at fault.

Positive

Before we used Dell solutions, I think we had been using HP machines, but this was in a different workplace and a different country altogether. I wouldn't be able to comment on the pros and cons of the previous HP solution because I had a different role there and wasn't closely involved with the hardware.

The team which is taking care of the HPC solutions consists of around six people.

With just this one instance, it was quite helpful, so I would say we have seen a return on our investment into Dell PowerEdge R-Series.

For the prices we offered for Dell PowerEdge R-Series support, I find the kind of response and assistance provided by Dell solutions to be quite excellent. I don't know if Dell PowerEdge R-Series plays a role in our AI initiatives because it's usually the customers who work with AI platforms and they have their own specific needs. Currently, we haven't heard any issues or requests from the AI team. I received feedback from Dell solutions once they reached out to us with an online feedback report. I have rated Dell PowerEdge R-Series an eight out of ten.