HP P440/2gb RAID controller with Samsung pm1643 for production environment

I'm planning to buy two refurbished servers to run as HA hypervisors.

I've found DL380p G9 which features a P440/2gb RAID controller. I also found some new Samsung pm1643 SSDs in very competitive prices. I'm planning to use 2 drives with RAID 1 configuration.

Since I only have experience with Intel's older SMC drivers, O would like to know if these drivers are fast enough to support multiple VM's (lots of random read/writes) while at the same time reliable enough to be used in a production environment.

You can use non-HP labeled drives for sure, but you’re going to void the warranty (I doubt you have anything left...) and you’re going to lose at least some of the monitoring & reporting capabilities. Either way if you’ll stick with some decent Enterprise SSD with power loss protection (This is your case so far...) you’ll be fine!