Supermicro A2SDi-H-TP4F Review 16 Core SoC With Power Consumption

[Patrick Kennedy]

Armed with the Intel Atom C3955 top of the line 16 core SoC the Supermicro A2SDi-H-TP4F has tons of features including 2x 10Gbase-T, 2x SFP+ and 12x SATA

The post Supermicro A2SDi-H-TP4F Review 16 Core SoC With Power Consumption appeared first on ServeTheHome.

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[DaSaint]

Hey @Patrick Just by any chance did you test ESXi on the board? From what i saw in the CPU Specs it should be able to run it with no issues. i would be curious to see a performance metric running Hypervisors on the XEON-D vs This Board..

Thinking more low powered solution boards for those that need a lab just not the electric expense That and i love the fact that this comes with Dual Copper and Dual SFPs for 10Gb which is an oddity in itself. (especially when it comes to the Xeon-D)

Also is the onboard SOC Storage Controller an LSI/Broadcom base like a 2116 or something else like an Intel or Marvell?

 

[Patrick]

There is a thread on the forums. ESXi 6.5u1 does not recognize the NICs so will have to side load a new Intel driver.

Storage is Intel SATA

 

[DaSaint]

@Patrick Gotcha, i assume then you never put a workload on it just tested to see if it loaded?

Thanks for the information on the SATA and the NIC drivers are expected, always the fun with new hardware/driver combos i bet in a few months there will be something more ingrained into the platform and usage of ASYNC drivers in ixgbe arent that uncommon these days

 

[ullbeking]

I'm very excited about this new board and hope to get one to complete my virtualization host and NAS solution. Aside from potential hardware compatibility issues, I'm slightly concerned about the need for chassis cooling as the heatsink doesn't seem to support a CPU cooler. One potential setup is a compute-only VM server (with the VMs stored on the NAS). The chassis I intend to use is well ventilated. Is there an option to use a direct CPU cooler, or do I really need to get chassis cooling to use this board effectively?

 

[Patrick]

I'm very excited about this new board and hope to get one to complete my virtualization host and NAS solution. Aside from potential hardware compatibility issues, I'm slightly concerned about the need for chassis cooling as the heatsink doesn't seem to support a CPU cooler. One potential setup is a compute-only VM server (with the VMs stored on the NAS). The chassis I intend to use is well ventilated. Is there an option to use a direct CPU cooler, or do I really need to get chassis cooling to use this board effectively?

I think SM will have active cooler versions of some of these boards. From what I have seen thus far, it is likely going to be a solution like this FS SNK-C0054A4L Supermicro Xeon D Fan

This weekend I did get a note that we received a validation board with a C3955 instead of a C3958. We are going to be updating this review with the Atom C3958 soon. For what we were doing, they should be ballpark performance similar, but we will validate.

 

[ullbeking]

> I think SM will have active cooler versions of some of these boards. From what I have seen thus far, it is likely going to be a solution like this FS SNK-C0054A4L Supermicro Xeon D Fan

Great, thanks for the link. I'll check it out and see if it's able to fit in the height of the case I end up using.

> This weekend I did get a note that we received a validation board with a C3955 instead of a C3958. We are going to be updating this review with the Atom C3958 soon. For what we were doing, they should be ballpark performance similar, but we will validate.

Looking forward to the restults! I'm hoping to use something like this as a lightweight virt server and NAS in one box, but I'm not so keen on these complicated setups where you have FreeNAS supplying the VMs, and the storage for those VMs supplied via VT-d passthrough from your HBA through to the hypervisor. I'll keep looking to see what is suitable.

 

[Patrick]

@ullbeking you may want to look into Proxmox VE 5.0. ZFS in Linux so no need for pass-through and KVM as a hypervisor/ Docker or LXC containers.

If you are just using it for storage, you can get by with an 8 core CPU.

 

[ullbeking]

> you may want to look into Proxmox VE 5.0. ZFS in Linux so no need for pass-through and KVM as a hypervisor/ Docker or LXC containers.

Cool, thanks @Patrick. I have looked into Proxmox, but similarly to FreeNAS, it seems to be an appliance that takes over the whole system. I'm wondering how much more effort it out be to simply run Debian+ZoL, but then again, seen as this is my first time setting up a homelab, the help given by Proxmox is probably going to be very useful.

I'm installing this in a Fractal Design Node 304, so there's enough room for a decent number of 2.5" SSDs and 3.5" HDDs, at least for an entry-level server.

> If you are just using it for storage, you can get by with an 8 core CPU.

No, that's my point. I'm initially planning on using this as an all-in-one box that does virtualization and NAS, preferably without too many complicated passthrough mechanisms to run the NAS software inside a VM.