The folks over at SimplyNUC has recently launched an exciting new Edge-focused product line called the extremeEDGE (EE) Servers and I recently had the opportunity to try out their latest 3000 Series (3rd generation of their EE platform) in my homelab for some testing.
As someone who is always on the lookout for interesting and clever ways to make the most out of your vSphere homelab investment, I was surprised there has not been more noise about the new NVMe Tiering capability in vSphere 8.0 Update 3!?
NVMe Tiering is currently in Tech Preview and it enables ESXi to use an NVMe device as a secondary tier of memory for your workloads, which IMHO makes it one of the killer features in vSphere 8.0 Update 3, especially with some interesting implications for Homelabs!
As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words ...
Picture on the left shows a system with 64GB of memory (DRAM) that is available before enabling NVMe Tiering and on the right, the amount of memory that is available after enabling the NVMe Tiering which is whopping 480GB! 🤯
Last month, I noticed a very interesting DIY (Do it Yourself) computer build from fellow colleague Cyprien Laplace, who you might know from the ESXi-Arm team.
No surprise, the build was for a new ESXi-Arm homelab using an ASRock Ampere Altra (ALTRAD8UD-1L2T) and configured with 64 CPUs and 128GB of memory! 🔥
first boot of my ASRock @AmpereComputing Altra machine! pic.twitter.com/iH1dYHWpWn
— Cypou (@cypou) January 14, 2024
At first, when Cyprien was sharing his build updates on Twitter/X, it looked like a standard DIY project but then several folks noticed he had a pretty unique computer case that included a built-in LCD screen! The classic grey/yellow screen pictured above running ESXi-Arm looks amazing and certainly useful for those wanting to remove the dependency of an external monitor.
If you are in the market for building or upgrading your homelab and want a unique computer case, check out th Jonsbo D31 which comes in both Black or White with two different models:
Black
White
Cyprien's ESXi-Arm build also recently won the best homelab community build (#3) project that was sponsored by Newegg and Ampere, so congrats on the W! 🥳🖥️🐈⬛
Watch the replay to see who won https://t.co/uBx5uE9uhX pic.twitter.com/Q48gCRlvyc
— Joe Speed (@JoeSpeeds) June 5, 2024