Low Power ESXI build vs Supermicro E300

[garetjax]

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

 

[Evan]

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.

 

[Kev]

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

VMware vSphere with Operations Management

 

[Evan]

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 ?

 

[Kev]

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.

 

[acquacow]

How low power do you want to go?

I have an x9 supermicro board with a used ebay L series xeon (65W), 64GB of DDR3, and some intel S3500 sata SSDs that idles just under 100W under normal usage.

It's also way cheaper than building up one of the newer DDR4 Xeon-D boards (I have a supermicro xeon-d 1541 as well).

-- Dave