YouTube Video Review - Supermicro SuperChassis 747 Based E5-Xeon VMware Server Build

We've just uploaded our latest YouTube video - a review of a Supermicro SuperChassis 747 Based E5-Xeon VMware server solution for a customer of ours.

The chassis used was a Supermicro 747TG-R1400B-SQ, which is a fantastic enterprise grade Tower or 4U Rackmount chassis. It has 8x 3.5" hot-swap bays compatible with SATA and SAS hard drives. The backplane in this chassis has standard discrete SATA connections, so the backplane is compatible with a wide range of motherboards and controller cards. While this particular build used an LSI controller have completed system builds with this chassis using both onboard SATA and other brand RAID/HBA Controllers, including Areca. The chassis is a full size case, accepting a very wide range of motherboards, but are not limited to Supermicro. You would need to purchase a front panel converter cable though if you intend to use a non-Supermicro board. The chassis accepts anything from Micro ATX through to Full Size Proprietary Supermicro. The case itself has 8x slots at the rear, allowing up to 4x dual-width GPU cards for example. The PSU has sufficient 6/8pin 12v connections on a dedicated 12v PSU rail to support GPU cards or multiple Graphics cards. The Supermicro 747 chassis also has excellent cooling, to aid with additional cards such as GPU’s – therefore there are a total of 6x hot-swap 4pin PWM 80mm fans. The chassis includes as standard, 2 fans at the front and 2 at the rear, but in this system the customer wanted additional cooling so this particular system includes the optional 2 front mounted hot-swap fans.

Installed in this server were 8x 2TB Toshiba Enterprise SATA III, 7200RPM drives (MG03ACA200). These drives are enterprise grade with this range going from 1TB through to 4TB in disk sizes, 6Gbps SATA interface and 64MB Cache. They have an excellent MTBF of 1,200,000 Hours and are designed for constant, high IO throughput 24/7.

The motherboard used in the system was a Supermicro X9DRI-F running currently with a Single Intel Xeon E5-2620V2 CPU and 32GB RAM. This CPU is the latest V2, so has 6 physical cores with HyperThreading, so will present 12 available cores to a guest OS. This motherboard supports dual E5-2600 Series CPU’s – For this build there is a single CPU installed, but a second could easily be added later. This motherboard also has onboard VGA, dual Gigabit and a dedicated IPMI Network Interface for remote configuration, monitoring and management of the system. IPMI is a web-based dedicated system on many Supermicro boards (the –F in the model means it has IPMI) that allows any network/Internet connected browsers to access the server securely, and to view status information, but most importantly, allows remote KVM access, so you can control the server as if you were sitting in front of it with a standard keyboard and mouse. This remote KVM functionality works brilliantly and there are no additional licensing costs for this either – You would pay £200+ for this functionality from DELL or HP!

The RAID card used was an LSI 9260-8i SATA/SAS Controller with the BBU for WriteBackCache. This RAID controller was chosen as it is an excellent model for both price, performance and reliability. The BBU was chosen as this system will be running VMware ESXI 5.5, and a BBU will allow the controller to run with full WriteBackCache, giving much better performance to the VMware installation. The local disks are to be used for the datastore in ESXI, so excellent performance was a requirement. The Toshiba drives in this installation were setup in RAID 10, which gives excellent Read/Write performance, as well as excellent redundancy in the event of a drive failure.

All of the products seen in the video review are available on our site to purchase individually, however if you would like to talk with us about a custom server configuration please call us on 0800 652 1649 or email us on [email protected]

Check out the video here!