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Removable drive tray accessory for Supermicro SYS-E302-12x fanless chassis

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For those in the market for a small form factor (SFF) Supermicro kit, you might be interested in a new removable drive tray accessory that I was just made aware by the Supermicro team. This new removal drive tray is only compatible with the new Supermicro SYS-E302-12x fanless chassis, which is the foundational chassis for a number of recent offerings from Supermicro including:

Note: I also wrote about the SYS-E302-12D last year, which you can read the full review HERE.

Here are a few pictures that was provided to me by Supermicro on what the drive tray looks like both from the side and top:

The drive tray will support both a 7mm or 8.5mm drive and will be one of the accessories that you can either purchase directly from Supermicro or one of their many authorized resellers.


The drive tray also reminded me of the removable M.2 NVMe to PCIed enclosure by Icy Dock in case you have a kit that supports full PCIe slot which is quite nice for hot-plug/remove capabilities.

VMware Cloud Foundation 5.0 running on Intel NUC

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Interested in trying out the latest release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.0? Don't have some beefy hardware to meet all the requirements, not to worry! Did you know you can actually deploy a VCF Management Domain using just a single Intel NUC or simliar small form factor system? This is exactly how I kicked the tires with the latest VCF 5.0 release 😎


Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

Requirements:

  • VMware Cloud Builder 5.0 OVA (Build 21822418)
  • VCF 5.0 Licenses
  • Intel NUC configured with
    • 64GB of memory or more
    • Dual onboard networking ("Tall" NUC like Intel NUC 11 Pro, which is what I used) OR add additional NICs with these Thunderbolt 3 Networking options (no USB NIC)
    • 2 x SSD that are empty for use for vSAN bootstrap (500GB+ for capacity)
  • ESXi 8.0 Update 1a installed on the Intel NUC using USB device
  • Ability to deploy and run the VMware Cloud Builder (CB) Appliance in a separate environment (ESXi/Fusion/Workstation)

Note: While my experiment used an Intel NUC, any system that meets the basic requirements above should also work.

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DDR5 SODIMM capable kits for ESXi

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After successfully confirming the new non-binary 48GB DDR5 SODIMM modules (96GB total) is fully functional with any DDR5 capable system, I started receiving questions about which DDR5 kits are currently available today and that can also be used with ESXi?

The ASUS PN64-E1 is definitely a top contender for anyone in the market for a new or updated VMware Homelab and it was also the system that I had used to verify the new DDR5 memory. In addition to the PN64-E1, the following kits listed below from my research also supports DDR5 SODIMM memory and would also be compatible with ESXi.

Note: While there are other DDR5 kits out in the market, especially those with an AMD CPU, they are not viable with ESXi as the onboard networking uses a Realtek network adapter and there are no ESXi drivers from Realtek.

If folks are aware of other kits that are both DDR5 compatible and would also function with ESXi, feel free to share by leaving a comment below.

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