E100-9W - A new fanless Supermicro "NUC" platform

At the end of 2020, I had published a blog article which covers the latest Supermicro kits that are being used and others that can be used for both VMware Homelabs as well as for production workloads. The article was very well received, especially as this is a topic that I frequently get questions about on the latest hardware kits that will work with vSphere, vSAN and NSX-T.

While researching for the article, I had a chance to speak with the Supermicro Product Manager and I came to learn about a new E100-9W platform that was just released last Spring of 2020. This platform is part of Supermicro's Embedded IoT family of servers and focuses on use cases such as Industrial Automation, Retail, Smart Medical Systems, Kiosks and Digital Signage to name a few. Many of these use cases are also applicable to our VMware customer base, especially for running a small and lower power footprint at an Edge or ROBO location. I was also interested in this platform as it could also be interesting for VMware homelabs.

Unlike the typical E200, E300 and E301 platforms that many of you are familiar with, the E100-9W is a fanless design, which can certainly help with the noise for those who have worked with Supermicro kits before. In speaking with the Supermicro PM, it was also mentioned that the E100-9W is comparable to an Intel NUC in terms of its capabilities and configurations, hence the title. However, I will say that the system is much larger than a standard 4x4 Intel NUC, it is about two times the width and I have some comparison pictures later in the post.

The E100-9W is available in three different configurations using an Intel 8th Generation i3, i5 or i7 processor.

• E100-9W-H (i7)
  • Release Date: March 2020
  • EOL: Q4 2026
• E100-9W-E (i5)
  • Release Date: March 2020
  • EOL: Q4 2029
• E100-9W-L (i3)
  • Release Date: March 2020
  • EOL: Q4 2029

The first thing you may have noticed is that this is not using the latest generation of Intel processors which apparently is due to constraints with Intel's embedded roadmap. With that said, there will be a refresh of this platform in the first half of this year that will take advantage of the latest Intel 11th Generation Tiger Lake processors, similiar to that of the recently announced Intel NUC 11 Performance and Pro. It is also important to point out that although the current CPUs may not be desirable for running a modern vSphere based environment, the support lifecycle of Supermicro platforms are quite extensive, 6 and 9 years respectively from launch.

Here is a quick summary of the hardware specifications:

• 64GB SO-DIMM (DDR4-2400)
• 1 x M.2 (2242/2280), PCIe NVME or SATA3
• 1 x M.2 (2242/2280), SATA3
• 2 x 1GbE onboard NIC
• 4 x USB 3.1 Gen 2
• 4 x USB 2.0

From an ESXi perspective, you can run the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 1c without any issues, both the storage and networking is fully recognized by ESXi without requiring any additional drivers.

Here is a peak inside of the E100-9W, with the storage and memory easily accessible once opened. The rest of the chassis is taken up by the COM ports and cables, which could be useful for certain types of workloads when running vSphere, but I suspect that most folks would prefer to see more modern I/O connectivity similiar to that of the E200/300 family or at least have another options or better yet, reduce the size of the chassis so its comparable to a typical Intel NUC, since they are in the same market segment.

Speaking of size, here is a side by side comparison of the E100-9W-H (top) and E200-8D (bottom).

As you can see, it is definitely much bigger and closer in size to the E200-8D system. I am sure the initial chassis design along with the fanless configuration was optimized based on their current customer base. It will be interesting to see what the upcoming Tiger Lake version of the E100-9W will look like, especially if the chassis is exactly the same or whether Supermicro is considering slimming it down and adding things like 10GbE networking and multiple M.2 NVMe support which could make it pretty compelling compared to the new NUC 11 Pro and Performance kits.