Best Home Server in 2022 for Virtualization and Containers

Hey what’s up guys brandon lee with virtualization how to hope everyone is doing well had a fantastic week and i am talking to you guys today specifically about home lab hardware home lab servers i recently pulled the trigger on another super micro server for my home lab

Environment and i wanted to share with you guys some of the reasons that i use these particular super micro servers in my home lab environment if you’re looking around for a server for your home lab environment and are unsure of what to purchase stick around i think you’re going to enjoy this video

As i go through a few of the details of my home lab as well as this new server that i have configured let’s dive right in I wanted you to meet the newest addition to my home lab server environment super micro z on d 2146 nt system on chip processor powered home lab servers and these are actually classified as edge servers edge data center servers embedded slash iot servers from super micro

And they fit the bill extremely well and i have been using these servers and similar from super micro for quite some time now and i have many reasons for that these servers are extremely powerful for their size they have a lot of enterprise capabilities built in such as built-in

Ipmi which is out-of-band management and just the real enterprise-y feel to the hardware and some of the add-on solutions that you can buy from supermicro just a level set this is not a super micro sponsored video although i would welcome that from super micro especially as much as i love their servers

But it’s simply for me and my home lab environment and my use cases and needs the super micro servers have really worked well for the workloads that i have wanted to run in my home lab environment so next i wanted to take you guys through taking a look at the

Insides of the super micro server the add-on card that i have added how i’ve mounted the hard drive inside of the chassis of the unit and a few other details this particular super micro server is the super micro sys e300 9d so it’s a system on chip home lab server

I just want to tell you guys i really love these super micro servers for my particular home lab they’re very efficient and very small footprint and they’ve got a lot of processing power features and other nice to haves for a home lab i wanted to kind of go through this e300

9d with you guys show you the insides show you how i’ve got drives mounted and some of the features on the internals i have the rack melt brackets on the side so i bought those as an add-on kit i’m going to be able to mount that in my

Home lab rack so let’s take off the top cover and i’ll show you guys on the inside okay so this is the inside plate or cover that covers over the internals of the server and this slides this way so it slides towards the front here you will once you

Have the top cover off you have the internals exposed and so what i’ve done the this top inner plate actually comes with the hole patterns for uh hard drive mounting so you can mount a hard drive here you can mount a hard drive here and also there’s uh holes here so three

Separate locations where you can mount hard drives i have added the super micro add-in card into nvme so if you want to see that video where i describe my nvme setup for vsan i talk about this card so this i configure this server with the riser card and this particular riser card allows

You to add the pcie slot card so that’s what i’ve done i’ve added the riser card you can’t see the nvme drives as it’s flipped over to the underneath side i have this server configured with 128 gigs of memory i’ve got uh 232s here and 232’s here so that that’s a memory

Configuration again the xeon d 2146 mt processor system on chip proc 8 cores 16 threads i have a lot of other servers in my particular home lab set up with the z on d system on chip processors and i i have really loved those in the home lab for efficiency purposes and they

Just perform they really carry the workloads that i have thrown at them with no issues and i have a lot of vms running in the home lab environment so i just wanted to show you guys how i have that configured on the inside i know the wiring is kind

Of messy i just threw this together last night and got the wiring in there and the drive mounted but that’s that’s how the internals look one of the great things about these units that i really love is the wealth of networking that they have these have six one gig ports as well as

Two 10 gig sfp ports this is a management port which is another great feature of the super micro servers they all have the built-in out-of-band ipmi management so you’ve got complete out-of-band control of your super micro servers so it’s you’ve got remote console you can mount virtual media

You can update firmware bios all of those things remotely and do that on the fly it does require a it’s around 30 or 40 dollars there’s a license that you have to purchase for out-of-band firmware and bios management however you get all of the other features without

The license so that’s how that works but one of the things i really love about these units is the wealth of networking capabilities that they have with the gig ports as well as the 10 gig gives you a wide range of possibilities and how you want to structure your networking how you

Want to set up your vlans if you want to use ports for vmotion dedicated ports for vmotion use the 10 gig slots for your virtual machine traffic as well as vsan traffic or however you want to carve those up i mean it’s really endless of possibilities

I’m a big fan of the converge networking now with vsan and with the newer versions of vsphere and converge networking just simply means you’re combining those different types of network traffic on very high bandwidth interfaces like 10 gig and higher gives you just a lot of possibilities with

That and this is kind of going to be my play host that i’m going to use to show you guys some basics with vmware vsphere also with proxmox and also with some hyper-v configuration hopefully you’ve enjoyed this video overview of the new super micro server that i have added to

My home lab fleet and some of the features that i really find to be extremely powerful and useful in the context of the home lab environment what kind of server hardware are you guys purchasing for your home lab environments have you been affected by supply chain issues have you opted to

Build your own servers or are you buying commodity off the shelf hardware let me know in the comments well i’m brandon lee please look forward to the future videos which i’m going to be using this hardware very heavily please do subscribe to the channel like the video

And i will see you guys soon [Applause] You