My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB Memory

Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by herpderperator on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @03:06PM (#20689164)

If you buy Supermicro motherboards, which come in regular form factors too, like for example X9SCM-F [0], or X11SSL-F [1], they come with IPMI (which is what the -F designates), which is exactly what iLO, DRAC, etc., is and in a normal form factor. You don't have to buy fancy jet-engine "server" boxes when you can get the same stuff in a mATX form factor. No license needed.

I have been using the X9SCM-F for the last 9 years, and enjoy being able to modify the BIOS remotely, boot remote ISO images, or troubleshoot any boot problems without physical presence.

[0] https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C202_C2...

[1] https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/X11SSL-F

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by aetimmes on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @03:32PM (#20689396)

Original parent comment was talking about installing a Ryzen consumer CPU, which is generally mutually exclusive with any board manufacturer (SMC, Dell, HP, or otherwise) that provides any sort of baseboard management controller.

Some of the SMC boards listed support i3 processors, but generally, if you want a BMC, you're stuck with enterprise-grade processors.

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by walterbell on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @08:23PM (#20691591)

ASRock X470D4U is a server board, with HTML5-based KVM via BMC, which uses Ryzen consumer CPUs.

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by ksec on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @04:04PM (#20699403)

Wow, I wonder how many people knows about this? I was also expecting BMC to be EPYC, and Enterprise exclusive only.

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by walterbell on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @09:19PM (#20701742)

It's often been sold out at Newegg, even with purchase limits. Price recently increased from $240 to $350.

No BMC license fee. Officially supports ECC UDIMM, Linux and PCIe bifurcation.

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by sitkack on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @11:22PM (#20692474)

Mr Erbell, you made my day!

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by herpderperator on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @03:55PM (#20689587)

I listed two motherboards I personally researched in the past and knew about already. There are plenty of consumer Supermicro boards that have IPMI. Here's one I found just by browsing the first page of their workstation motherboard section. [0]

[0] https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/X11SCA-F

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by rhizome on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @04:36PM (#20689961)

None of yours are Ryzen, though.

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by bsder on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @05:21PM (#20690386)

Um, these are AMD EPYC (the server processor):

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/H12SSW-NT

All Supermicros for EPYC have IPMI.

This EPYC is $599: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16819113596?Item=N82E1681911359...

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by rhizome on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @02:09AM (#20693091)

I'm not disputing, just seeing: this in the page from your previous comment:

Intel® 8th/9th Generation Core i9/Core i7/Corei5/Corei3/Pentium®/Celeron® series Processor, Intel® Xeon® E-2100 Processor, Intel® Xeon® E-2200 Processor. Single Socket LGA-1151 (Socket H4) supported, CPU TDP support Up to 95W TDP

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by aetimmes on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @10:25PM (#20692220)

Right, but the distinction we're making upthread is not Intel vs AMD, it's consumer CPU vs server CPU.

You can get out-of-band management with Xeon motherboards, or with Epyc motherboards, but you're likely not going to get a motherboard with out-of-band management with a Ryzen CPU or a Core i[3579].

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by oarsinsync on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @10:57AM (#20696192)

But hilariously you can get IPMI with Atom motherboards

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by dahfizz on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @05:40PM (#20690558)

> they come with IPMI... which is exactly what iLO, DRAC, etc., is

iLO / iDRAC implement IPMI, but they are not the same thing. iLO and iDRAC provide web interfaces, remote iso mounting, granular boot control, remote vga, etc. There's a lot of useful features not available in a "standard" IPMI implementation.

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by herpderperator on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @07:31PM (#20691300)

You are confusing IPMI 1.0 with IPMI 2.0.

> Systems compliant with IPMI version 2.0 can also communicate via serial over LAN, whereby serial console output can be remotely viewed over the LAN. Systems implementing IPMI 2.0 typically also include KVM over IP, remote virtual media and out-of-band embedded web-server interface functionality, although strictly speaking, these lie outside of the scope of the IPMI interface standard. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Platform_Managemen...

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by mopsi on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @07:08PM (#20691175)

I used to have X9SCM-F, and its implementation also had a web interface, remote ISO mounting and remote VGA.

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by herpderperator on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @07:29PM (#20691287)

Agreed; I also have X9SCM-F, and was able to do all that (which I already specified in my parent comment.)

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by parliament32 on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @01:52PM (#20698072)

IPMI does all of that and hundreds of more features. And it's licence-free.

https://www.supermicro.com/en/solutions/management-software/...

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by dahfizz on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @05:50PM (#20700347)

Again, IPMI is a standard which includes basically none of these features.

The BMC that vendors use implement IPMI and also usually provide these features.

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by jlgaddis on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @05:02PM (#20690202)

I've got Supermicro -F servers and I've got PowerEdge servers with iDRAC Enterprise. Yes, the Supermicro servers have basic remote management features but the iDRAC Enterprise offers so much more.

If you're just running a couple servers in a home lab, yeah, it's probably not worth it but for a company with a bunch of servers the additional management features are absolutely worth it, IMO.

Redfish [0] is looking like it's gonna be pretty awesome too.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redfish_(specification)

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Re:My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB ... by bubblethink on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @08:03PM (#20691471)

They are both different levels of bad. At least supermicro is free. The whole low level bios and BMC space is stuck in some 90s parallel universe. coreboot+openbmc can't come to the masses soon enough. It would be like what linux felt like after windows.

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