Question 1

How do the 3.5" hard drives mount? In the photos I don't see any HD cages.

Accepted Answer

The 3.5in drives (qty 2 max) mount on the right of the chassis. One nearest the faceplate and the other, side by side closer to the back. There are a series of holes drilled in the bottom of the chassis, all covered with a thin, but semi-rigid plastic sheet with corresponding punch outs. I'm assuming the plastic is there to cover all the unused holes in the chassis and avoid air leakage. There are supplied screws in which to mount the 3.5in drives directly to the bottom of the chassis.  2.5in drives (qty 4 max) requires a SuperMicro mounting bracket, sold separately. The 2.5in bracket mounts similarly to 3.5in drives.

Question 2

How noisy is this server? I want to use it as a small file server to put on my shelf in my office and am reading it's fairly quiet for a 1U server, and I don't mind a little noise because my desktop has 6 120mm fans all blowing away at 45-50% at idle and I was wondering if this will be any nosier then that.

Accepted Answer

Frankly I had it downstairs with other servers, so any noise it would have made I would have not noticed.  However, when I was initially setting it up in my office it was pretty quiet.  The fan in the back has a bit of sound to it, but nothing that would have prevented it from staying up in my office.

Question 3

Does this product go onto a standard 19" server rack?

Accepted Answer

Yes.  I have 3 of these mounted in standard server racks.  I had to buy some M5 cage nuts separately to fit the screws that come with the chassis.  It just mounts in the front, no rails.

Question 4

I am looking for a memory that is compatible with this server. I found one on your website.

Kingston 8GB 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) ECC Unbuffered Server Memory Model KVR16LSE11/8

Could anyone help ensure this memory will work with this server before I make a purchase?   Thanks

Accepted Answer

I have used the Kingston 8GB 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Server Memory Model KVR16LSE11/8 successfully with this server populating all four memory slots.

Question 5

Will this run esxi 5.x?  From intros site this cpu supports vt.

Accepted Answer

I'm running Hyper-V Server on mine. I haven't tried ESXi on it but while the CPU may work for ESXi my experience with ESXi is that you also need a storage controller that ESXi supports. I don't know if this server will work or not without an appropriate storage controller.

Question 6

Does the motherboard support any RAID types? I'm asking because I want to use 2 SSDs in RAID1 for redundancy. I will use this as PBX with CentOS or KVM Server with Debian Jessie

Accepted Answer

It has 6 SATA ports on the board.  There is no built in hardware RAID controller.  You can do software RAID with it and since you want to mirror that should work for you with native OS support.

Question 7

Do you think this machine with 24 or 32GB memory and 4 SSDs could handle running ESXi with 8-10 VM's? Most VM's will have 1GB running Debian 7. The VM's will host services such as OpenVPN, FreeRADIUS, Unifi Controller, Apache & MySQL, Subversion/SVN, and centralized logging. There will be no more than 5 concurrent VPN connections. The Apache/MySQL will be internal facing only with maybe 3-5 users concurrently. So overall activity is minimal.

Accepted Answer

It's hard to give a clear yes or no since I don't know the specifics of your workload, but I can share how I use the machines and you can make your own judgement.

I bought two of these machines, installed 32gb ECC memory and 4x2TB SATA drives in each.

I run 18 VPSs (OpenVZ) on each host; a mix of Debian and CentOS with CentOS 6 as the host OS.  Software in the VPSs include: bind, syslog-ng, openldap (multi-master), mit kdc, squid forward proxy, jboss (various apps), apache http server, puppet components (master, dashboard, db), pgsql cluster, git, mysql, ntp, nfsen/pflow receiver, and a hadoop cluster (4 VPSs, 2 per node) for experimentation purposes.

The cryptographic performance is pretty good on this host for things like transferring over ssh, rsync, etc.  I get about 100MB/s throughput over a single connection.  I may be hitting the limitations of my switch at this point.  This is far better than what I got out of the D525 processors (at 16MB/s it was CPU bound).

I aggregate all 4 physical interfaces on the server using LACP and use vlan encapsulation to connect to different networks.

I don't use VMWare, but it looks like this cpu does not support vt-d.  I am not sure how that impacts VMWare performance.  It does support vt-x, which is good for how you plan to use them.

Question 8

Will non-ECC memory work on this motherboard?

Accepted Answer

Not according to the manual or compatibility references.
I have opted to go with ECC and it works fine.

Question 9

Can you boot ESXi from SD card? What would I need to get this to work? How big of an SD card?

Accepted Answer

There is a nice USB port directly on the board. Memory is so cheap 32GB should be easy enough. Consider PXE network boot with this much network connectivity.

Cheers,

Question 10

For some of the older Supermicro atom servers, this disk bracket is indicated for converting the 1x3.5 bay to 2x2.5. Will it work for this chassis as well? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811994023

Accepted Answer

I used 2 3.5" drives so I didn't need it but looked into 2.5" as well. Found in the forums that it works and when I got the server the manual shows the adapter as optional.

Questions & Answers