X11SDV-8C-TP8F - nano sim card

[TedB]

X11SDV-8C-TP8F has just arrived and we have noticed that it has a nano sim card slot.

Anybody has any experience how to use this functionality and how to access the sim card ?

Online manual supplied by Supermicro is very enigmatic it only states: "Nano SIM Slot for M.2 B-Key WAN card support". This might indicate that some sort of M.2 WAN card is required to use the nano sim card slot but there is no further information about this

Any ideas ?

https://www.supermicro.com/manuals/motherboard/d/MNL-2007.pdf

First impression of this board is very positive, Linux Debian sees properly all network ports including 4x10GE ports however we are going to run proper tests in next few days.

 

[marcoi]

Outside your question, but i been looking at those boards for a while. I wanted to see what your use case for it would be? Also did you get a case for it? What memory did you end up getting?

 

[Blinky 42]

I would guess it is connected to "JMD2 M.2 PCI-E 3.0 x2/S-SATA4 Connector (B-Key 3042)" so you could do a combo m.2 WiFi / Cell modem in there and have it access the sim to register on the cell network.

Which would be a pretty neat feature as an emergency backup access method if it was deployed as a router. Would love to know if anyone has attempted that.

 

[Patrick]

@Blinky 42 that is what I was told it is for. Xeon D gets deployed at the edge quite often.

 

[TedB]

@marcoi we have few potential uses for this board, at first it will be tested as a bgp router, then as a network virtualization (ovs) router and maybe some other network functionality. Another use is virtualisation, the maximum memory is 256GB with standard DDR4 ram but that should suffice as it's our current standard for virtualisation hosts. We want to connect micron 9200 max ssd disks to this board as well and see how it performs as well. Any ideas how else it can be put to good use in service provider environment ?

@Blinky 42 can you recommend any of these M.2 3g/4g cards which would allow to send text messages from linux ? Cellular network (wan) connectivity is of less importance to us, however it's a great idea that this can be supported as OOB access in remote locations.

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

can you recommend any of these M.2 3g/4g cards which would allow to send text messages from linux ?

I use a sierra wireless MC8780 in one of my boxes for SMS alerts, somewhat old and 3G only but that's fine for sending texts.

 

[marcoi]

@marcoi we have few potential uses for this board, at first it will be tested as a bgp router, then as a network virtualization (ovs) router and maybe some other network functionality. Another use is virtualisation, the maximum memory is 256GB with standard DDR4 ram but that should suffice as it's our current standard for virtualisation hosts. We want to connect micron 9200 max ssd disks to this board as well and see how it performs as well. Any ideas how else it can be put to good use in service provider environment ?

My use case would be for home/SMB usage. I want to consolidate down several servers (e5-2600v1/v2 gen) into this unit. Mostly it would be running as a AIO ESXI box which runs FreeNas for storage, and several VMs I need for home and business use. A few issue for my use case are the lack of pcie ports for addon cards and cost.
I also dont know if it worth getting this unit vs a full size MB or server.