2U Supermicro servers are my go-to. These are much quieter than 1U servers, but the fans spin at 8800RPM. The IPMI fan modes available are Full (9000RPM), Heavy IO (6000RPM), and Optimal (supposed to auto-adjust). Unfortunately, setting the Fan Mode to Optimal seems to have a floor speed of 4500RPM, which is too loud. Even … Read more
AMD’s new EPYC 3201 is a good processor for a near-silent server …without sacrificing performance. I saw good price on an open box Supermicro M11SDV-8C-LN4F. It includes an embedded AMD EPYC 3201 8-core processor (Update: 2023-03-21: the 3201 is no longer available, I’ve updated the post and links to point at the newer 3251). I’ve … Read more
Catching up on email, I saw a Newsletter from iX Systems announcing the FreeNAS Mini XL (the irony). On the new FreeNAS Mini page it looks just like the FreeNAS mini but taller to accommodate 8-bays. Available on Amazon starting at $1,500 with no drives. Here’s the Quick Start Guide and Data Sheet. The pictures show what appears to be equipped … Read more
Playing with bhyve Here’s a look at Gea’s popular All-in-one design which allows VMware to run on top of ZFS on a single box using a virtual 10Gbe storage network. The design requires an HBA and a CPU that supports VT-d so that the storage can be passed directly to a guest VM running a ZFS … Read more
I don’t have room for a couple of rackmount servers anymore so I was thinking of ways to reduce the footprint and noise from my servers. I’ve been very happy with Supermicro hardware so here’s my Supermicro Mini-ITX Datacenter in a box build. Motherboard: Supermicro X10SDV-F CPU/Motherboard: Xeon D-1540 X10SDV. 8 cores (16 including HT … Read more
I ran some performance tests comparing the Intel DC S3700, Intel DC S3500, Seagate 600 Pro, and Crucial MX100 when being used as a ZFS ZIL / SLOG Device. All of these drives have a capacitor backed write cache so they can lose power in the middle of a write without losing data. Here are … Read more
Here’s my latest VMware + ZFS VSAN all in one server build based on a Supermicro platform… this is borrowing from the napp-it all-in-one concept where you pass the SAS/SATA controller to the ZFS VM using VT-d and then share a ZFS dataset back to VMware using NFS or iSCSI. For this particular server I’m … Read more