Supermicro M11SDV-8C-LN4F AMD Epyc 3251 8-Core Embedded Mini ITX Motherboard with Quad GbE LAN, IPMI

I bought this to Homelab and get some VM experience under my belt. Using ESXi worked flawlessly, very plug and play experience. This thing barely draws any power. Cooling this with Nactua fans made this thing only audible under full load and I have to put my head up to my rack to hear it. Paired With RAM: 64GB 2x32GB DDR4-2933 PC4-23400 2Rx4 ECC Registered Server Memory by NEMIX NVME: 1TB 980 Pro Networking: I would of loved to see this thing with 10 Gbps instead of 1 Gbps but having 4 ports on 1 board is nothing to scoff at either. IPMI Username/Password is not standard anymore make sure you take a picture of your unique password to avoid having a headache later V Thermals V At first I didn't have any additional cooling outside of the case fans and the system still ran fan, it was only when I transcoded did the system start sending out thermal warning, I added in 2 additional fans and the issue went away. IDLE: 44c (Two Linux VM's Running) TypicalLoad: 56-60c (5 VM's Running, Linux and Windows) Max Load: 74c (6 VM Running, and Transcoding) Cons: IPMI needs additional license to unlock features. Overall: Very happy with how well this performs considering how cool it runs and how little power it consumes. My server, switch, modem, velop AP consume together less than 60 watts *I added a P4 now it consumes 115-125 Watts*. Considering this runs 24/7 I am glad it doesn't take up an insane amount of power.

Small, powerful and perfect for a VM/Container server. Loaded it up with 256GB of ECC memory and a few SSDs. My 1U server build consumes ~40W at the wall on idle (4 x SuperMicro blade fans (8W), 256GB RAM, 2 SSDs and 1 NVMe drive). 70W on full load.

I am using this to set up a virtualization home lab. I ended up putting 64GB into it which comes out to 4GB per virtual CPU ( you have 16 ). It is quiet and power efficient and you get 16 vCPUs to play with. The lights-out management is cool. I put it into a Supermicro case with four hot-swap drive trays with a couple of Western Digital Red 4TB drives ( slow, spinning at 5,400RPM but I am not looking for performance and I can front them with a solid state caching drive to improve that ). I now realize that I really need a virtualization server and a storage server running FreeNAS or similar and I am wondering if I get another 8/16 CPU or just an 8 without the threading. The only other thing I now question is whether I should have gone for the 32GB RAM sticks so I can ultimately upgrade to 128GB. You can just never have too much RAM but it gets a little pricey. You can't come close to this for value for money in a home server situation.