WilliamLam.com

Supermicro Home Lab Group Buy

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Happy New Years everyone! I was supposed to get this out right before the holidays but #babylam got really sick and I had to put this on hold.

Back in November I threw out an idea on Twitter to see if the #vCommunity would be interested in doing a group buy for some Supermicro kits, especially for those looking to upgrade their personal home labs to take advantage of all the new VMware goodies such as vSAN, NSX and PKS for example.

Within minutes, I had several dozen replies and it was clear that folks were definitely interested in refreshing their lab, especially with a smaller and more modern platform. Over the last few weeks, I have been working with MITXPC (who I have worked with before) on putting together some packages that would appeal to the majority of the community. Initially, I was thinking about three options: system-only (no memory/storage), system with memory (no storage) and system with memory and storage. To be clear, system means complete chassis with CPU and motherboard included. Please see the product links below for more details. 

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with MITXPC nor am I receiving any referral bonus/compensation for the discounts listed below.

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Supermicro E300-9D (SYS-E300-9D-8CN8TP) is a nice ESXi & vSAN kit

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Supermicro kits such as the E200-8D is a very popular platform amongst the VMware community and with powerful Xeon-based CPUs and support for up to 128GB of memory, it is perfect for running a killer vSphere/vSAN setup!

Earlier this Fall, Supermicro released a "big daddy" version to the E200-8D, dubbed E300-9D and specifically, I want to focus on the 8-Core model (SYS-E300-9D-8CNTP) as this system actually listed on the VMware HCL for ESXi! The E300-9D can support up to half a terabyte of memory and with the 8-Core model, you have access to 16 threads. The E200-8D is also a supported platform by VMware, you can find the VMware HCL listing here.


I was very fortunate to get my hands on a loaner E300-9D (8-Core) unit, thanks to Eric and his team at MITXPC, a local bay area shop specializing in embedded solutions. In fact, they even provided a nice vGhetto promo discount code for my readers awhile back, so definitely check it out if you are in the market for a new lab. As an aside, when doing a quick search online, they also seem to be the only ones actually selling the E300-9D (8-Core) system which you can find here and in general, they seem to be priced fairly competitively. This is not an endorsement for MITXPC, but recommend folks to compare all prices when shopping online, especially as today is Black Friday in the US and Cyber Monday is just a few days away.

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ESXi on the new 2018 Apple Mac Mini

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Thanks to the Green Mini Host (Apple Mac Mini hosting and collocation provider) who were the first to publicly confirm that latest release of ESXi (6.7 Update 1) works on the recently announced 2018 Apple Mac Mini.

For vSphere/vSAN Home Lab enthusiasts, the price of the new Mac Mini, especially when it is fully loaded is probably a tough sale. However, for customers developing on MacOS including iOS development, CI/CD, build farms, gaming, etc. which benefit from running on vSphere. For these customers, support for ESXi on the new Mac Mini is extremely interesting, especially with the updated hardware giving these systems a significant boost in performance even when comparing to the current Mac Pro 6,1 and iMac Pro models. In fact, I had number of folks ping me after Apple introduced it during their keynote asking if ESXi would work on the Mini's.

UPDATE (06/25/20) - The Apple 2018 Mac Mini 8,1 is now officially on the VMware HCL and is fully supported with ESXi 7.0b, which contains the fixes mentioned above. See note below on 06/23 for more information.

UPDATE (06/23/20) - ESXi 7.0b has just been released and contains fixes for both the MacOS guest boot issue support for Thunderbolt 3 devices which now enables support for the vSphere 7 release. One additional enhancement, customers no longer need to configure the ESXi Advanced Setting to enable Thunderbolt 3 support, this is now automatically configured based on detecting an Apple hardware system such as an Apple Mac Mini 2018 or Apple Mac Pro 2019. This is a patch release and you will need to go to the VMware Patch Portal site to download and apply the update.

UPDATE (04/28/20) - ESXi 6.7 Patch 02 resolves a number of the issues mentioned below, please take a look at this blog post here for more details.

Disclaimer: 2018 Apple Mac Mini are NOT officially supported by VMware. The only officially supported Apple hardware platform is the Mac Pro 6,1 or Mac Pro 5,1 and Mac Mini 6,2 or Mac Mini 7,1. For more details, please refer to VMware's Hardware Compatibility List.

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