Low Power ESXI build vs Supermicro E300

All,

I am looking for a low power and quiet ESXI build, probably 64GB ram to start, m2 would be nice. Will be using it to run a firewall vm and a few other vms. Do not need a lot of storage.

I see there are new versions of the Supermicro E900-9D, one with a Xeon D-2123IT, one with the atom C3858, and one with a xeon 1528-D. Not sure if its work building my own vs getting one of these. They all have 2 10gb ports and prices range from $677 for the . D-1518 to $1014 for the atom c3858.

Any thoughts on which is best?

Thanks

 

Low power but prior generation full cores D-15xx
Brand new full cores D-21xx
Atom cores C3xxx

The atom will be the lowest power, the D-15xx next and the D-2100 will need some more watts and certainly will be loader although I think that anything 1u won’t be that quiet.

I think the best ESX support will be D-1500 system, the C3000 chips certainly had some missing network drivers but there was somebody here who created a vib and it’s working until they release the next major patch of ESX I would guess.

 

I have an ATOM C3000 board running ESXi 6.7 and official 10GBe drivers from Vmware.

VMware vSphere with Operations Management

 

Ok great then there is a supported solution now for C3000 NIC’s.

Since you have one running how is it ? I have never used a C3000 and granted it should be a big step up on C2000 it’s still a big step down from a full Xeon core. I guess as long as you don’t need maximum per thread performance it works ok ? Well even ?

 

For my needs, its low power and perfect. It runs:

Cyberpower Agent
Openmedia vault, ZFS with pair of Raid1 1TB SSDs
OPNSense testing ground
Starwind 1TB HA with my other host
VCSA 6.7
1 or 2 Windows10 test machines

Current migrated to my other machine
pfSense
daloRadius

Nothing is compute intensive but the ability to install 64GB of SODIMM is perfect.