While I was at Zettagrid I was lucky enough to have access to a couple of lab environments that where sourced from retired production components and I was able to build up a lab that could satisfy the requirements of R&D, Operations and the Development team. By the time I left Zettagrid we had a lab that most people envied and I took advantage of it in terms of having a number of NestedESXi instances to use as my own lab instances but also, we had an environment that ensured new products could be developed without impacting production while having multiple layers of NestedESXi instances to test new builds and betas.

With me leaving Zettagrid for Veeam, I lost access to the lab and even though I would have access to a nice shiny new lab within Veeam I thought it was time to bite the bullet and go about sourcing a homelab of my own. The main reasons for this was to have something local that I could tinker with which would allow me to continue playing with the VMware vCloud suite as well as continue to look out for new products allowing me to engage and continue to create content.

What I Wanted:

For me, my requirements where simple; I needed a server that was powerful enough to run at least two NestedESXi lab stacks, which meant 128GB of RAM and enough CPU cores to handle approx. twenty to thirty VMs. At the same time I needed to not not blow the budget and spend thousands upon thousands, lastly I needed to make sure that the power bill was not going to spiral out of control…as a supplementary requirement, I didn’t want a noisy beast in my home office. I also wasn’t concerned with any external networking gear as everything would be self contained in the NestedESXi virtual switching layer.

What I Got:

To be honest, the search didn’t take that long mainly thanks to a couple of Homelab Channels that I am a member of in the vExpert and Homelabs-AU Slack Groups. Given my requirements it quickly came down to the SYS-5028D-TN4T Xeon D-1541 Mini-tower or the SYS-5028D-TN4T-12C Xeon D-1567 Mini-tower. Paul Braren at TinkerTry goes through in depth why the Xeon D processors in these SuperMicro Super Servers are so well suited to homelabs so I won’t repeat what’s been written already but for me the combination of a low power CPU (45w) that still has either 8 or 12 cores that’s packaged up in such a small form factor meant that my only issue was trying to find a supplier that would ship the unit to Australia for a reasonable price.

Digicor came to the party and I was able to source a great deal with Krishnan from their Perth office. There are not too many SuperMicro dealers in Australia, and there was a lot of risk in getting the gear shipped from the USA or Europe and the cost of shipping plus import duties meant that going local was the only option. For those that are in Australia, looking for SuperMicro Homelab gear, please email/DM me and I can get you in touch with the guys at Digicor.

What’s Inside:

I decided to go for the 8 core CPU mainly because I knew that my physical to virtual CPU ratio wasn’t going to exceed the processing power that it had to offer and as mentioned I went straight to 128GB of RAM to ensure I could squeeze a couple of NestedESXi instances on the host.

https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/midtower/5028/sys-5028d-tn4t.cfm

• Intel® Xeon® processor D-1540, Single socket FCBGA 1667; 8-Core, 45W
• 128GB ECC RDIMM DDR4 2400MHz Samsung UDIMM in 4 sockets
• 4x 3.5 Hot-swap drive bays; 2x 2.5 fixed drive bays
• Dual 10GbE LAN and Intel® i350-AM2 dual port GbE LAN
• 1x PCI-E 3.0 x16 (LP), 1x M.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4, M Key 2242/2280
• 250W Flex ATX Multi-output Bronze Power Supply

In addition to what comes with the Super Server bundle I purchased 2x Samsung EVO 850 512GB SSDs for initial primary storage and also got the SanDisk Ultra Fit CZ43 16GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive to install ESXi onto as well as a 128GB Flash Drive for extra storage.

Unboxing Pics:

Small package, that hardly weighs anything…not surprising given the size of the case.

Nicely packaged on the inside.

Came with a US and AU kettle cord which was great.

The RAM came separately boxed and well wrapped in anti-static bags.

You can see a size comparison with my 13″ MBP in the background.

The back is all fan, but that doesn’t mean this is a loud system. In fact I can barely hear it purring in the background as I sit and type less than a meter away from it.

One great feature is the IPMI Remote Management which is a brilliant and convenient edition for a HomeLab server…the network port is seen top left. On the right are the 2x10Gig and 2x1Gig network ports.

The X10SDV-TLN4F motherboard is well suited to this case and you can see how low profile the CPU fan is.

Installing the RAM wasn’t too difficult even through there isn’t a lot of room to work with inside the case.

Finally, taking a look at the HotSwap drive bays…I had to buy a 3.5 to 2.5 inch adapter to fit in the SSDs, however I did find that the lock in ports could hold the weight of the EVO’s with ease.

BIOS and Initialization’s boot screens

Overall First Thoughts:

This is a brilliant bit of kit and it’s perfect for anyone wanting to do NestedESXi at home without worrying about the RAM limits of NUCs or the noise and power draw of more traditional servers like the R710’s that seem to make their way out of datacenters and into homelabs. The 128GB of RAM means that unless you really want to go fully physical you should be able to nest most products and keep everything nicely contained within the ESXi Host compute, storage and networking.

Thanks again to Krishnan at Digicor for supplying the equipment and to Paul Braren for all the hard work he does up at TinkerTry. Special mention also to my work colleague, Michael White who was able to give me first hand experience of the Super Servers and help make it a no brainer to get the 5028D-TNT4.

I’ll follow this post up with a more detailed a look at how I went about installing ESXi and how the NestedESXi labs look like and what sort of performance I’m getting out the the system.

More 5028D Goodness: