I'm looking to get a new-to-me machine to use as a Proxmox server. I'd like some horsepower, and I see there's quite a few selections of dual Xeon workstations out there. I don't have a rack so the rackmount stuff is out (plus, my experience is the workstations aren't as loud). I'm looking at the newer Silver/Gold/Platinum CPU's, something with DDR4 minimum. I currently have a HP Z6 G4 and like it but I need it for work so can't mess with it. I've looked at the Lenovo P920, HP Z6/Z8 G4, Dell T7920. My Z6 is nice but the storage is all internal, I'd really like something with a backplane and exterior drives, or the ability to upgrade to that (I see the P920 has backplane kits?). It also uses a daughter card for the 2nd CPU whereas the G8 uses one board with both CPU's. I plan to use 3.5" spinning drives for storage but would like to use NVMe for OS and VM's so I'd like at least a couple NVMe slots.
Are any of these brands workstations a better platform for building out a storage VM server from it?