You know, I gave the entire Xeon-D a good, long look, and I am not sure if I really want to go through with it.The Xeon-D boards are nice, I have several version with diff NIC and CPU combos and will let you do a lot of actual work on the box if you get one with enough cores. If you are not in a hurry, may be worth going for the the AMD based boards once available just to be that much more cool in a cool case like that
The problem is like this:
a) They are expensive but getting on a bit (even a 4 core D1521 is close to $400), and once it's outfitted with PSU, RAM and storage, that number jumps to around $1000 for something that can boot. I still have to hunt down data center leftovers to populate it.
b) Copper 10GbE? *facepalms* Yeah, I'll have to buy 10GBaseT SFPs.
c) I kinda don't want to buy a Xeon-D just to shoehorn it into chassis that I would consider to be...hmm...disposable.
d)What can I learn on the Xeon-D that I cannot learn already on my existing setup? (HP t73, a iSCSI quadbay storage device and a soon-to-be-added 10GbE layer 3 router/switch)
Right now I am doing all the read-ups that i can on this bucket of magnificance.
So, what is it? It's a quadcore ARM A72 SoC with full virtualization and IOMMU capabilities. No guess as to whether the 10GbE ports can do SRIOV based PCIe VF partitioning. If it does, well, that would look pretty damned good for my needs.
Last edited: