After the last episode HomeLab Stage LXXV: Cloud Foundation on Dell VRTX, it was time to refresh Datacenter III.
The existing host for all my vSAN Stretched Cluster Witnesses was not stable enough (after 90-120 days uptime, the VMs become stuck and only a reboot of the ESXi host helped). The Intel Celeron CPU was also not the most powerful one…..
The existing ESXi host had only 32GB of memory, which was sometimes a bottleneck for all my Stretched Clusters. My new host should be capable of 10-12 Witness appliances.
What to choose for a new Datacenter III host with low power requirements?
SuperMicro E300-9D sounds like a perfect fit for me. Thanks to my friend Daniel 🙂
- Intel Xeon-D-2123 with 4 Cores @2.20GHz
- 4 x 64GB DDR4 ECC Memory = 256GB
- 4 x SATA Ports for SSDs (soldering is required for more than 2 devices)
- Dual 1 / 10 GbE network
How to add more than the official supported 2 SATA devices to the machine?
There are additional ports available, but no power cable…. I soldered two additional power cables for additional devices. My system has now the following SSDs:
1 x 256GB SATA SSDs for ESXi binaries
1 x 4TB SATA SSDs for Witness VMs
1 x 4TB SATA SSDs for Cohesity Replication (more on that topic later)
The system itself was too loud, even for a Datacenter III (Garage), so I decided to tweak it. I replaced the orginal OEM fans with a Noctua version and I also attached a power reduction cable from Noctua to reduce rpm speed. The fan noise decreases significantly!
Next step was the power reduction within ESXi and the BIOS. First I installed an advanced license key to enable additional features via IPMI. BIOS Update via GUI, tweaking options etc. Highly recommended!
Inside ESXi I configured the following advanced parameters:
“Continue only if you know what you are doing”, yes of course 🙂
I have attached the system to one of my network switched PDUs to perform remote power operations. I also attached an VGA / USB KVM cable from my central KVM system (IBM CGM16) with HTML5 support.
I have patched cables for the KVM solution inside all of my 3 Datacenters to allow remote HTML5 console sessions, even when the embedded iDRAC for example is not working.
Stay tuned for the next episodes of my HomeLab / HomeDC journey. I have a lot more in progress…..
Next episode: HomeLab Stage LXXVII: AI Supercomputer