SUPERMICRO SYS-6016T-MTLF 1U Rackmount Server Barebone Intel 5500 Dual LGA 1366 Dual Intel Xeon 5600/5500 Series

Pros: Please don't forget this - CableHero Multi-Lane SFF-8087 Mini SAS to Discrete 4x SATA II/3G RIGHT-ANGLE L-Type, Internal Data Hard Drive Forward Breakout Cable - 14 to 24 Inch: CABLEHERO-SAS190 (RoHS, Lifetime Warranty) (Ver 2, Red)

Cons: None

Pros: Has good chipsets on the board with room to grow. A great blade option for 1U virtualization if you understand what you're doing.

Cons: You'll want to get a real raid controller since this server is barebones. But the fan housing is too close for normal SATA connectors on the backplane. I had to dremmel out notches in the plastic grill over the fans to get standard connectors to fit without smashing the wires. They expect you to have low profile which I never seem to have for SAS setups.

Other Thoughts: Installed with xen 4.0 on debian 6.0 using Seagate constellation SAS drives via 3ware 9750-4i's and LVM. (define rootdelay=5 in grub to let the card initialize) But if you're going to do virtualization whether it be Xen, VMWare or whatever you need to understand that write caching for RAID configurations is extremely important. I don't know how many times I run into other IT guys who skimp on the card or don't understand what the battery backups are there for so they don't get it. Then they complain that its the hypervisor or the servers fault they don't know how RAID works or why write caching isn't enabled. Buy a real raid card just like you'd do from Dell, HP, whatever at an added price and also buy the cache battery / battery backup unit (BBU) so you can safely turn on write caching. (if you can be unsafe about it, depending on the card) If you do that you'll have a nice little 1U virtual server. Ours are running everything from windows 2k8 R2 HVM to RHEL and deb paravirt guests.

Pros: System works with VMware ESXi 5.0.

Cons: Removing existing SATA cables was a pain. Installed Adaptec RAID card and using the kit cable was a pain as well.

Pros: This barebone is wonderfully built from a brand you can always rely on. Our company paired a few of these with 2x Intel 5645 Hex Core processors (total of 12 physical cores and 12 hyperthreading cores), 24GB DDR3 UDIMM memory, and 4x1TB Western Digital RE4 drives in RAID-10.

PROS:
* Built in reliable IPMI
* 1U Barebone that comes with heatsinks and rails
* Quality parts
* High wattage energy efficient power supply
* Passive heatsinks cool these 6 core CPU's to about 40C idle

Cons: Can't say much about cons, because there aren't many. Here's a few minor ones.

CONS:
* It takes forever to post
* SMTP alerts are flaky
* Supermicro support is meh
* No redundant power supplies (understandable for the price)

Pros: nice features for the price, stable. love the built in impi managment. It's greate to be able to install a OS by bringingup the managment console on my laptop and using the virtual cdrom feature.


Internal usb socket - great for installing vmware esxi onto a flash drive.

Cons: Onboard raid is softraid so it will not work in vmware esxi. Luckly the drives will show up as independant disk's in vmware and can be used that way.

Other Thoughts: I wish someone had told me that if you only populate one of the 2 cpu sockets you will only be able to address 3 of the 6 memory slots. I purchased 6x4gb sticks and a single e6506 cpu and can only see 12gb of ram until I install a second cpu.

the onboard usb socket is a great way to install a internal flashdrive for esxi. Just make sure you get a really small thumbdrive.

Pros: Pretty small form with a lot of potential (dual CPU, 6 mem slots). You can end up with a pretty gutsy server for the price. I'll end up with a dual quad-core 24GB server - nice!

Cons: Wanted to run ESxi (and will do so) but lack of RAID support from ESXi was a surprise. Just because the BIOS allows you to "enable" Intel or Adaptec RAID, this is NOT the same as an above board hw solution (which ESXi requires).

The real killer? You need to load the RAID driver from a FLOPPY to use Win2003 - I have no idea how to do this because THERE IS NO FLOPPY in this server. Is this SuperMicros problem of Microsofts? Dunno, don't care, just annoyed...Google is my friend if I want to do this (or just go Win2008 I suppose).

Other Thoughts: I will end up going with ESXi (it came right up and installed without a problem) even though RAID is not supported. Most of my woes here are lack of technical understanding around ESXi vs. BIOS RAID vs. using a floppy on server-style servers. Hopefully my thoughts here will help you prepare.