this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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37
If you're building a whitebox server, you need to see this motherboard! (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
39 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I'm sorry to disappoint you, in that this is a consumer motherboard. So yes, AMD PSP exists, no iLO.

However, that's where the bad part ends.

Behold, what is in my opinion, the most server-like MicroATX board released to the consumers: the MSI PRO B550M-VC WIFI Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard/alternate link.

If you followed the link and read the specifications you would know exactly what I'm talking about, but for people who didn't, here is the summary:

  • 4 x16 ports (3 of them work at x1 speeds, the one closest to the CPU is PCI Express 5.0 x16).
  • 8 SATA3 ports (people who wanted to build a NAS should be visibly salivating at this point).

Apart from that, there are 2 nice features that I would personally like to point out, as I look for these features in every board:

  • 128GB of RAM supported (no ECC, and I suppose a lot of motherboards support it now, but nice to have).
  • A 2230 E-key slot.
    • I know a few of you might be wondering why I'm mentioning the slot used for a WiFi card in this post - I invite you to take a look at this.
      • It's a link to an Aliexpress item, so if you don't want to click, here's a short version: It's an E-key to 2.5Gbe converter, using a Realtek RTL8125B chip. It's amazing, I learnt about these adapters from a random Level1Techs video. I think a lot of people could use this.

And there you have it. If you're building a system that requires heavy PCIe access and a lot of SATA3 storage, I think this is the best value you can find when purchasing new.

Cheers

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you for the tip. I will look into Xeon-D integrated motherboards. I will not be running very heavy loads (other than a Suricata instance for an IDS/traffic analyser - I would love suggestions which might be lighter on compute - which might be heavy). The idea for training ML models was just a remote possibility.

My apologies, I kept saying iLO/iDRAC when I meant IPMI.

Why do you suggest having separate devices for storage/compute?

My idea was to run FreeBSD on a ZFS mirror of NVME drives as the base, and run VMs/Jails on a pool of SATA SSDs. These would exist alongside HDDs but would otherwise not affect their functioning. In this scenario, how does having 2 machines make my infrastructure more reliable, other than FreeBSD not running as intended?

Have you had instances of memory corruption because you didn't use ECC? I was under the impression from r/selfhosted that this problem was blown out of proportion.

The reason I mentioned the E-key slot is because that way, I don't have to use a PCIe slot for the adapter, which I might use for something else. I have no need for 10Gbe.

Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why do you suggest having separate devices for storage/compute?

because storage never needs to be upgraded beyond drive capacities, unless you need for a bunch of NVMe storage which requires more pcie lanes. The only reason you should have to change a board or cpu in a storage server is if it dies. If you need a new piece of hardware for its new features, it would be much easier to upgrade a different system rather than taking your storage offline to do it. whatever gpu you put in there now is going to be dated in a couple years when you may want to upgrade.

Have you had instances of memory corruption because you didn’t use ECC? I was under the impression from r/selfhosted that this problem was blown out of proportion.

no because i dont run big storage pools on desktop hardware. you may be able to run non ecc memory for a long time and not get any data corruptions, but that doesn't mean you wont. also it's not always obvious when there's corruption especially in older data.

The reason I mentioned the E-key slot is because that way, I don’t have to use a PCIe slot for the adapter, which I might use for something else. I have no need for 10Gbe.

what are you going to do on those two x1 sockets? theyre really not good for anything other than usb and 1gbit (maybe 2.5gbit?) networking, or maybe a sound card. those m.2 adapters are more suited for minipcs that dont have any other pcie expansion options. not saying you can't or shouldn't do it, but why? especially when 10gbit options are much cheaper if you buy used.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for your comment. I'll keep this in mind :)