The servers in my home lab are dying on a daily basis. After four years of active duty, I think they have the right to retire. So I need something else. But what? I can’t rent lab space as I work with unreleased ESXi code. I’ve been waiting for the Intel Xeon D 21xx Supermicro systems, but I have the feeling that Elon will reach Mars before we see these systems widely available. The system that I have in mind is the following:

Intel Xeon Silver 4108 – 8 Core at 1.8 GHz (85TDP)

Supermicro X11SPM-TF (6 DIMMs, 2 x 10 GbE)

4 x Kingston Premier 16GB 2133

Intel Optane M.2 2280 32 GB

CPU

Intel Xeon Silver 4108 8 Core. I need to have a healthy number of cores in my system to run some test workload. Primarily to understand host and cluster scheduling. I do not need to run performance tests, thus no need for screaming fast CPU cores. TDP value of 85W. I know there is a 4109T with a TDP value of 70W, but they are very hard to get in the Netherlands.

Motherboard

Supermicro X11SPM-TF.Rocksolid Supermicro, 2 x Intel X722 10GbE NICs onboard and IPMI.

Memory

Kingston Premier 4 x 16 GB 2133 MHz. DDR4 money is nearing HP Printer Ink prices, 2133 MHz is fast enough for my testing, and I don’t need to test 6 channels of RAM at the moment. The motherboard is equipped with 6 DIMM slots, so if memory prices are reducing, I can expand my system.

Boot Device

Intel Optane M.2 32 GB. ESXi still needs to have a boot device, no need to put in 256 GB SSD.

This is the config I’m considering. What do you think? Any recommendations or alternate views?