Hats off to Patrick Kennedy, for not only having the very latest gear straight from Intel, and for getting such comprehensive benchmarks out so quickly, with many more such tests to come. As always, great information over at his STH (ServeTheHome): Intel Xeon D 12 and 16 core parts launched – f…
Jan 08 2016 Update - New Xeon D Product Line-up info now available below, and in Patrick Kennedy's wonderful article, New Supermicro Intel Xeon D Motherboards – Even with 12 and 16 core chips!. It's that time of year, when many an IT pro or PC enthusiast huddles up in their home labs and prepare f…
Nov 10 2015 Update #1 - Supermicro has already updated some of their product pages, with apparently no changes to SKUs or part #s or components, details below. Nov 10 2015 Update #2 - ServeTheHome has now published SR-IOV details at THE BROADWELL-DE INTEL XEON D-1500 SERIES AND SR-IOV. More…
Updates to this article below The Supermicro SuperServer 5028D-TN4T motherboard and CPU installed come pre-installed in a compact chassis with a 250 watt power supply, all pre-wired and ready to boot, complete with a 3 year warranty. Most places you buy this system, it arrives bare-bones, which…
JUN 30 2015 Update - New "deep dive inside" 38 minute video now available. Since last night's live-streamed unboxing and power-up-ing, I've since spent a bit of quality time off camera with this little beast, installing and configuring and testing ESXi 6.0. While fresh in my mind, I…
Updates to this article below, and lots of pictures now available too! A second camera view is now available, without the desktop shown, here. Rather than hours of arduous video editing to join the best of both videos together, time is probably better spent doing a new much shorter new video,…
My Supermicro SuperServer 5028D-TN4T is now on order, see status updates below. JUN 30 2015 Update - New "deep dive inside" 38 minute video now available. Back in 2013, we broke past the 32GB RAM restrictions for VMware ESXi 5.5, even the free version. But the hardware costs of getting a…
Above image courtesy of Samsung's SATA to PCIe article, excerpt here: When the 8 channels in typical applications are multiplied by the 400 MB/s transfer rate spanning multiple NAND Flash memories, the result is a 3.2 GB/s data transfer speed. This transfer rate is out of range for SATA to…
As of June 22nd, it appears you can place your order and expect shipments to start June 23rd. Broadwell-DE Xeon D-1540 advanced CPU features table As I mentioned recently, the venerable Intel I-350 gigabit NIC works nicely with ESXi 6.0, and will likely be on an updated VMware HCL (Hardware …
I decided to open a web page feedback dialogue with Intel about Z97 memory limits earlier this week, on behalf of the home virtualization lab enthusiast community. I wanted to have confirmation before publishing this article, to be reasonably sure that Intel's site didn't have some sort of errors. T…
Wow, it's been 5 years since "VMware VMDirectPath and Intel VT-d" was published on VMware TV. This 3 minute spot is an oldie but goodie, still relevant, still spot on in its concise description of the benefits of pass through in the enterprise, particularly well suited for 10 gigabit…
In this new article: Intel To Showcase SSD Overclocking At IDF13 San Francisco – Possible With Ivy Bridge-E CPUs on August 24 2013 WCCFTECH's Hassan Mujtaba states: You must be wondering how SSD overclocking can be possible or if an SSD even allows overclocking in the first place? Well it is po…
SPCS001 - Technology Insight: Intel® Next Generation Microarchitecture Code Name Haswell Per Hammarlund, Ronak Singhal, Hong Jiang This technical deep-dive with video is from an April 10 2013 presentation at IDF2013 (Intel Developer Forum) in Bejing, China is now available, with a brief …
So, it would seem I'm at a fork in the road. Trusty vZilla has now been alive for about 2 years, a Core i7 2600 CPU on a Z68 (Sandybridge) ASRock motherboard with 4 DIMM slots, humming along with ESXi 5.1 and nested Hyper-V quite nicely. Right now, I'm at 4 x 8GB, totaling 32GB, and I'm running …
With the LSI 9266-4i/9266-8 RAID adapter expected next month, and new Ivy Bridge motherboards arriving this summer, I've begun to wonder: If I was setting out to build my virtualization system today, would I choose different parts than I did back in June of 2011? Read/write caching using SSDs seems…
The focus of this glossary is virtualization, storage, motherboard, and network technologies. These companies have quite an alphabet soup, such as VT-c described above, and I find it can be pretty tough to keep straight. Hope this helps! Each section is cut and pasted from the listed source.…
Z68 Sandy Bridge, 1Q11 X79 Sandy Bridge-E, 4Q11 (costly CPUs for enthusiasts) Z77 Ivy Bridge, 2Q12 Two of the better very recent articles on the new Z77 Ivy Bridge chipset: Intel's Ivy Bridge vs. Sandy Bridge Benchmarks Leaked Intel’s Next Processors Detail Leak: Ivy Bridge Benchmarks, Specs, and R…
CORSAIR CWCH60 Hydro Series H60 High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler I'm not trying to be a review site, but instead, more focused on blogging about the actual step by step ways I've found to make various products work for my projects. In other words, I don't claim to have reviewed every product in a…
Feb 28 2012 Update: Great news, with some patience and careful shopping, ~$200 USB can now get you 32GB of RAM that works great, given 32GB is what the free Hypervisor 5.0 supports maximum anyway, good deal! TinkerTry.com/32gb-memory-on-asrock-fatal1ty-z68-professional-gen3-motherboard I cannot…
Mar 14, 2012 Update: For more pics, see also TinkerTry.com/gzillacompleted. For more backstory, see also tinkertry.com/boyobio. For boyo's new site, see boyostarcraft.com. Back when creating vZilla, I decided to standardize on this same motherboard I've become quite familiar with, for a gaming …
I may have launched TinkerTry.com/vzilla nearly a month ago, but the vZilla documentation wasn't really complete. I need to add far more build details (photos, storage configuration, video of building RAID array, etc), and reorganize the way that I present the information. Now that I've completed th…
Jan 26 2012 Update: Getting into RAID BIOS setup is now found to be easy, see solution at: TinkerTry.com/lsi-knowledgebase-article-points-tinkertry-method-configure-lsi-raid-z68-motherboard This article is getting rather stale (outdated), but is still quite popular. Below, you'll find how it first…
Pricing info in this newegg.com screenshot as of Jul 17 2011 subject to change at any time: I’ve been able to spend about 10 days with the ASRock Z68 Extreme4 motherboard, and I’m now able to give it a cursory overview, having kicked the tires a bit, with both Windows 7 x64 SP1 and VMware ESXi 4.1…
I’ve tested 4 brands of Z68 motherboards out, and the results are in, certain ASRock and MSI Z68 Motherboards can do VMDirectPath! I tested these 4 mid price point boards myself while building vZilla and each cost somewhere between $170-$230. As of July 14, 2011, using the BIOS version listed in t…
TinkerTry - PCs, EVs, home tech, efficiency and more, including virtualization. My opinions here. Currently consulting while seeking my next employer.
Paul Braren, MCSE in 1998, VCP #2681 in 2005, vExpert 2014 to 2024, Veeam Vanguard Emeritus, 2015 to 2019.
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Easily update VMware ESXi at TinkerTry.com/easy-update-to-latest-esxi
After 6 successful years testing then shipping well over 1,000 Xeon D Bundles, Wiredzone had to stop selling them in mid-2021 due to cost, supply, and logistics challenges. The Xeon D-1700/2700 (Ice Lake D) was a minor refresh for 2023, with Xeon D-1800/2800 (Granite Rapids D) refresh slightly better in 2024, and hopefully Xeon 6 (Granite Rapids-D) much better in 2025 featuring PCIe Gen5, MCRDIMMs, and 100GbE networking, wow! I'm bummed that Pat Gelsinger was apparently ousted from Intel's helm in these challenging times, but I'm also grateful to have had the honor of working at VMware when he was the CIO there. I'll leave it at that, given the whole Broadcom thing.
