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Supermicro 2021 Homelab Group Buy

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After many months of planning and discussions, today I am excited to share the Supermicro 2021 Homelab Group Buy with the VMware Community! 🥳

A big thanks to both Supermicro and the Aspen Systems team for supporting this community initiative.

Details

This group buy is for a barebones (includes CPU) Supermicro E300-9D-8CN-8TP, which is a very capable platform for running your VMware Homelab which I have previously written about here and here. As a successor to the popular E200-8D, another benefit of the E300-9D is that it is officially listed on the VMware HCL and is supported with the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2 release.

Since this is the first time we are partnering up with both Supermicro and Aspen Systems for a group buy, we wanted to keep the program simple and initially focus on US based users. If this group buy is successful, we will work with the team to run a similar group buy for other regions such as EMEA/APJ. For this group buy, we have been able to secure a 20% discount for the VMware Community and does require a minimum quantity of 300 units to be purchased to qualify for the discounted rate. If you are interested in participating in this group buy, please visit the URL below. In addition, I will also periodically update this blog post with the latest numbers, so folks have an idea of the overall progress.

Lastly, please help get the word out by sharing this blog post with your friends, colleagues and social network!

UPDATE 2 (06/03/21) - Shipping estimates have changed to ~12-14 weeks due to current global shortages. Group buy website has also been updated to reflect units sold, which will happen at the end of each business day.

UPDATE 1 (06/02/21) - Quantity per customer has been increased to 4

Details Description
Minimum Quantity 300
Unit Cost $1350 (includes taxes and fees)
Shipping Cost Calculated based on destination
Shipping Time ~12-14 weeks
Start Date June 2 2021
End Date July 5 2021
Group Buy URL http://vmwa.re/supermicro-2021-groupbuy

2021 VMUG Advantage Community Group Buy

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Last year, I partnered up with the VMware User Group (VMUG) organization and shared with the VMware Community a special VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy offering, a first of its kind and it was a huge success! In fact, I still get pinged on a regular basis about the previous group buy and whether there would be another group buy?

Today, I am pleased to announce that both myself and Duncan Epping have teamed up with the VMUG organization to bring to the VMware Community the 2021 VMUG Advantage Group Buy!

For those not familiar with the VMUG Advantage membership, it provides benefits such as access to training, VMworld discounts but also to EVALExperience, which provides you with 365-days access (non-production usage) to the latest VMware solutions such as vSphere, vSAN, NSX, vRealize Suite and VMware Cloud Foundation. The EVALExperience alone is worth the normal $200 USD membership fee and is certainly one of the cheapest and easiest way to get access to all the latest VMware offerings for homelab and educational purposes.

The table below provides the respective discounts based on the quantity of VMUG Advantage membership purchases. The larger the interests group, the larger the discount.

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ESXi 7.0 Update 2 enhancement for USB NIC only installations

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The USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling has been an extremely popular Fling that has allowed customers to easily add additional networking capabilities by using a supported USB-based network adapter even though ESXi traffic over USB networking is not officially supported.

In most deployments, the USB network adapter is usually a supplement to the existing onboard network adapter of a system. However, there have been scenarios where the onboard network adapter is either not available or functional and customers would still like to be able to install ESXi and have it running over just the USB network adapter.

Although installing ESXi using just a USB network adapter is possible today, one downside is that an additional workflow is needed to fix the network binding after installing ESXi.

During the interactive ESXi installation, you will see the following error at 81% which will cause installer to get stuck

Exception: No vmknic tagged for management was found.

At this point, the installer has completed and you need to switch to the console (Alt+F1) and perform a reboot. Once ESXi reboots, you will need to go into the DCUI and manually bind the vusb0 interface for ESXi management for connectivity. To persist this USB NIC binding, you will need to add small snippet of code as outlined here.


Obviously, this was not an ideal user experience and I personally had to use this workaround on several occasions, especially for newer hardware platforms where the onboard network adapter may not be recognized by ESXi and being able to use the USB Network Fling definitely came in handy.

With the release of ESXi 7.0 Update 2, we have improved the user experience for installing ESXi with just a single USB NIC. This enhancement was added by Songtao after mentioning the undesirable behavior. A new ESXi kernel boot option called usbBusFullScanOnBootEnabled can be added which removes the need for the workaround mentioned above. This new kernel option forces a full bus scan to claim all USB NICs that are attached since USB device claiming is slow compared to PCIe devices.

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