"Project USB to SDDC" by William Lam, featuring Xeon D inside!

Posted by Paul Braren on Apr 15 2017 (updated on Apr 17 2017) in
  • Virtualization
  • ESXi
  • HomeLab
  • The more of us out there using ESXi 6.5 on Xeon D, the better! Recently, there have been some more virtualization enthusiasts writing up their positive experiences with Xeon D. William Lam mentioned Xeon D back in Febuary, and Tai Ratcliff's had a recent look at SuperMicro vs Intel NUC.

    Xeon D's M.2 NVMe, IPMI, 4 NICs (2 of them 10GbE!), and 128GB of RAM certainly makes for some interesting possibilities. More of my thoughts to be added right to this article soon. Meanwhile, consider reading all of William's great new articles featuring Xeon D inside those Supermicro SuperServers:

    • Project USB to SDDC – Part 1
      Apr 04 2017 by William Lam at virtuallyGhetto

      I thought to myself, would it not be cool if you could simply plug in a USB key which had a specific configuration defined and have ESXi, vCenter Server Appliance and vSAN automatically install and configure itself without any additional user interaction?

    • Project USB to SDDC – Part 2
      Apr 13 2017 by William Lam at virtuallyGhetto

      ...VMware colleague Tai Ratcliff reached out and offered to let us borrow his Supermicro kit for the demo which was great as the hardware was much beefier than the NUC. Thanks Tai!
      ...I can see why is a pretty slick system for a vSphere/vSAN based home lab, especially if you need to go beyond 32GB of memory which is where the Intel NUCs currently max out at.


    See also at TinkerTry

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