Hyve Zeus v1 Server good for Esxi?

[JohnnyBoy]

I saw a number of older posts on the forum about the Hyve Zeus v1 1u servers that are sold on ebay and wanted to take peoples take on them for running ESXI 7. I am looking for a server to train on and learn more about Vmware.

 

[Sean Ho]

yep they work just fine for pure compute, if you have storage elsewhere. Can even toss in 2x SATA3 SSDs if you like. The big limitation is only one PCIe slot, 3.0 x16, and no onboard SFP+. E5v1/v2 are getting long in the tooth, but still workhorses, and DDR3 RDIMMs are cheap.

The stock fans, 5x 40mm, have a high-pitched whine even at idle, not what I'd want in my office.

 

[JohnnyBoy]

Thanks for the reply , Do you know if they can boot from a sata dom ? I am thinking of putting in 2 SSD's and then when time and money permits to build storage.

Are there any other enterprise solutions at that price point for learning ESXI 7

 

[BoredSysadmin]

If this is just for LAB/learning - you could just use a beefed-up desktop (32GB ram and 6 or more cores) and use several nested ESXi

Nested

Here is a consolidated page on all the articles that I have written about Nested Virtualization. All Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances Installing ESX / ESXi in VM Refresher on Nested ESXi Networking R…

www.virtuallyghetto.com

No point in trying to learn to work with "enterprise" solutions based on cheaply made crappy ancient pizza boxes.

 

[Sean Ho]

I find them pretty sturdy; they're a variant of X9DRD (with all the PCIe slots ripped out except for one) in something similar to a CSE512. The rails are peachy. None of the SATA ports in this gen have built-in SATADOM power (that came in X10); the X9DRD-iF has a separate 5v SATADOM power header, but I believe it's missing on this board. There's just the 2x SATA3 ports, nothing else.

I/O is very limited on these boards; I use the PCIe for CX354 NICs and put all the storage elsewhere. No doubt these are old systems. I second the idea to use nested virtualization for learning; work with what you have already!

 

[Markess]

I find them pretty sturdy; they're a variant of X9DRD (with all the PCIe slots ripped out except for one) ...

It's an X9DRD-LF

Supermicro | Products | Motherboards | Xeon® Boards | X9DRD-LF

 

[JohnnyBoy]

Thanks for all the feedback I am going to have to dig through some boxes and see what I have in back stock for building a desktop. But most of my old hardware will be pre 2012. I guess my reason for going with enterprise hardware was having the second CPU and normally high memory support.