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.
In recent years, there have been a number of new players that have entered the mini PC market that have really been pushing the boundaries on small form factor systems. Minisforum is one such company, that was founded in 2018 and have been steadily producing more interesting kits to compete with some of the more established vendors in this space.
Early on, the kits from Minisforum were pretty comparable (compute, network and storage capabilities) with other vendors using the popular 4x4 design, pioneered by Intel with their Intel NUC platform. With each new generation of mini PCs from Minisforum, the chassis aesthetics started to become more unique and they started to have more differentiated offerings like broader CPU choices including some of the latest AMD desktop and mobile processors.
Even I was intrigued by some of Minisforum offers from a VMware perspective, but unfortunately Minisforum had no interest in collaborating when I had reached out a while back. Over the years, I stayed informed of new releases from Minisforum but nothing really stood out to me as much as their recent announcement of the Minisforums Workstation MS-01.
UPDATE (03/05/2024) - SimplyNUC has just launched the Onyx Pro, which is nothing more than a rebrand of the Minisforums MS-01 and review here would also apply to SimplyNUC OnyxPro.
SimplyNUC has been a long time partner/reseller of the popular Intel NUC platform for quite some time but over the past few years, they have expanded their portfolio to include additional 4x4 systems that are completely designed in-house by SimplyNUC include Topaz, Ruby, Cypress and Chapel Rock to just name a few.
Moonstone is the latest 4x4 addition from SimplyNUC, which is an AMD-based kit that includes support for the latest AMD Zen 4 (Phoenix) and Zen 3+ (Rembrandt R) processors. The VMware Community has always been interested in an AMD-based kit but typically they do not work well due to the presence of a Realtek-based network adaptor, where drivers from Realtek does not exists for ESXi.
The first thing that caught my attention when I first heard about Moonstone was that this was an AMD kit that features an Intel-based network adapter as its primary network interface! 😲
This definitely took me by surprise, not sure if AMD was making any statements about their networking choices or simply diversifying their networking options? 🤔 Either way, I was not complaining and I thought this might be the first real viable AMD 4x4 candidate, from a VMware perspective, in quite some time.
Thanks to the SimplyNUC team, I did not have to wonder much more and I got the opportunity to put the Moonstone through its paces and see what it can do for the VMware Community!