 Tom here from Lawrence Systems and SuperMicro wanted to send me a server for a review and I was like, okay, I haven't done a SuperMicro review, but we do really like their servers. We actually use quite a few of these in production and there are some of the servers in our back end of our office. One of them that runs specifically where this video is being recorded to is a SuperMicro server configured to be my free NAS storage array. And this is a pretty nice application server they sent us for a review. And let's get into it. But first, if you'd like to learn more about me and my company, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you'd like to hire short project, there's a hires button right at the top. If you want to support this channel in other ways, there's affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services we talk about on this channel, including a link to our Patreon if you'd like to become a Patreon supporter. We also have a swag store where you can get shirts and other items that are for sale and that changes from time to time what's available and what's not. So go ahead and check that out frequently. And finally, our forums. If you'd like to have a more in-depth discussion about this video suggestions for new videos or just reach out say hi and talk tech, our forums are a great place for that. All right, now back to the content. So this is the SuperMicro Super server 1029P WTRT. It currently has dual socket Xeon Silver 4214 processors in here. And then for the hard drives they shipped in here, we have five Intel SSD D3 S4610 series. These are 3.84 terabytes back over to the server. Something I really like that they have included in this that not only does it have two SFP plus ports on it, that's through an add-in PCIe card, it also has built in two 10 base T LAN ports via the Intel C622. So I have two RJ45 10G connections and two SFP plus connections. Now this also has support for SuperDOMs, disk on module ports, one VGA. And yes, I know there's always that question seems to come up of why don't servers have HDMI on there. And it's because a lot of compatibility in when you're putting this in a data center. Also, it's just something you don't really use very often because this does come with the full SuperMicro IPMI, which we will be covering. And as I said, it's got currently those Intel's five of the 10 bays are occupied with those Intel's and the onboard RAID controller. So this is a really impressive system. Also does have 120 gigs of RAM in here and some platinum power supplies. But let's go ahead and take a look at the overhead and kind of dive into what it physically looks like. Now, one of the first things I want to comment on is the fans. They're not bad. No, they're not the same as some others where you can have just drop in hotspot. They're kind of just all put together to come out pretty easily and they're just kind of clipped in and have little dampers to keep them from making noise. But my kind of complaint, but it's a really minor one, is this is not it's just double sided tape holding it on there. It sticks down there pretty good. But if you wanted to take this off like the air plenum to clean it, you're going to have a hard time. She'll just have to put a little double sided tape and it's held down quite well by the cover being on it. But I just, that's the only thing I found from a design standpoint that I said, well, not my favorite feature on there because not that you take these out of the rack often to ever do anything like clean them. But if you were to and you get a little dust in here, you know, a little tricky, it's not like the previous versions I've seen with a super micro where the plenum was just set down on top and you can move it. But moving on, we take a look over here. We have the MVME slot. We have the card slots over here. So we have a PCIe here, here and one below where you can't quite see. So there's extra room. This is the adding card with the 10 gig SFPs. This is the extra RAID controller they have. So it does have good RAID support and we'll cover some of those details on the, when we go into the IPMI or in the configuration of it. Now we also have on this side here, the power supplies. These are platinum rated 80 plus hot swap power supplies, redundant two of them on there. And they're nice, easy, lightweight overall, easy to slide in and out. There's no trickiness. So these slide drop right in really easy. Actually, everything's really smooth in terms of that. When we come around to the front, we have the status lights, two USBs in the front, power button, UID option, and then the hot swap drives that we can slide out. Now they're fairly snug. They don't feel like they're going to just flop out. That's for sure. They do slide in relatively smooth. When you're pulling them out, you've got to put a little effort on there, but I think they're, you know, very fresh. So they're not broken, which is fine. You probably don't want drives just flopping in and out, but they slide in as smooth and they feel, I feel confident clicking them in. And these are very similar to what has been on Super Micro for a long time. Coming around the back, yes, there's that VGA connector that I really don't need to use because we have the IPMI. Now we also have four USB threes and these two 10 gig Intel ports, as I mentioned, and then this is the adding card with the SFP. And you can see that I can put another card here, another card here. So this, by the way, is only room for a half card, depending on what other features you may have room for. It's something of note when you're looking at this, that you have to have enough clearance because there's not a lot of distance. So if you were to put a card in here with a large heat sink, it would then possibly collide with this heat sink if you put one of those cards in there. But kind of a minor thing, just something to keep aware of. But being that this is such a small server, it's not one that you're likely to put a very large card in. You would probably buy a, you know, a much larger server for something like that. Now I've already got XTP and G loaded on here. So let's go ahead and look at the software. I'm going to fire it up and we'll actually finish recording in the other room. Although this is not that loud of a server, and I'll give you a decibel reading here, it still is not something it's fun to listen to when you're trying to record and show some of the other demos in the software and cover the IPMI part, which we're going to log into next. Now this is what it sounds like on boot. You're looking at about 76 DBA here, 77 roughly for boot. But then once it's booted up, it goes down to about 67 or so, 66. So it's really not too loud of a server. Ideally, you're going to be installed this in the data center. And you know, it's a better fit for it. Now let's go over here and start with the login for the dedicated IPMI. I really like that it has this dedicated one. And of course, as I mentioned, it does have VGA out, but you don't usually use a VGA because you're going to use the nice, simple HTML five way to get to the desktop here and install things on it. So this works really fast. It's no problem if you work it over a VPN, I've done some testing when I was at home VPN into the office, I can manage this server perfectly fine. If I have to get to the desktop, go to the device and it does have the virtual keyboard. This is really nice because when you're setting up the rate array and we set this up in a raid 10, you use the control and to get to the next screen, but control and launches a new browser window and Chrome. So being able to hit control and then end to be able to get to something or any special key combinations, the virtual keyboard is kind of handy for that. You also have a few other options here like power control and capture options. But one of the other things is really nice. And I don't have any installed here, but virtual media. So if you have a local share that you want, you can then attach this that way. This is really nice. So if you wanted to attach an image to this without plugging USB in to get it loaded, or maybe you're doing it remotely, they do have that option as well. So they have shared a host path, the image username, password, optional and the ability to mount this. So nice features they have built in there. They're going to go over here. We have readings has a chassis information, those details, hardware information here. And you can expand and see the Intel 42 14 that I mentioned earlier, see each one of the pieces of memory, the max speeds of the memory, et cetera, who manufactured it. So all the information is really nicely laid out here, makes it pretty easy to get a status of the system, server health, sensor readings, everything. The only thing that's read right now is chassis intrusion. But outside of that, it's got all the statuses and the voltages over here and everything else you're looking for. So you can get an idea of each step, like the dim temperature, peripheral temperature, et cetera. So I do like this, we'll do an intrusion reset that should fix the one error we have, I think they have a lid back on it now. Loading that and down to warning, it'll eventually clear that. Now, this does have the option to let you know if something's wrong. So it doesn't just have health events in here and power information, but also the ability to notify you and set up notifications. So if something goes wrong with the rate array or anything like that, it will, you can configure it to notify you via email, and it does offer SNMP monitoring as well. Oh, and IPMI, I don't want to forget about that. So we've got multiple ways for you to connect and get into the system. Now, another nice thing about this with the super micros is the ability to do the bios updates right through here. So it makes it easier for you to download the file, choose the file, upload the new bios to the system. They overall, I've always liked this about super micro, you know, my older super micro systems have this, granted the older ones didn't have the nicer HTML five, but they, they're really handy to be able to do the bios update on here, because it's one of the easiest ways to do it. Now, onto the configuration page, there's actually a lot you can configure in here. So if you wanted to actually tie this together, and I thought this was kind of neat where you can actually tie the super micro system into Active Directory radius, you can set all the network setting here, set up a dynamic DNS, which we'll cancel that SNMP. So these are ways you can get your mail server notices sent to you. If you wanted to have it monitor that, there'd be plenty of options for ways to configure it. And as I mentioned, SNMP as well, and you can set the fan modes here, and I left everything at default, but you can just force the fans full speed is another option, or set them to a heavy IO usage. So they got a couple different options in there. And of course, syslog. So if you have a syslog server, and you wanted to send things to it, well, this has syslog built in. So you can just push those notices over that way. So that's, you know, nice features of having all this and having it on a dedicated next, so you can create your own management network. And it's common in some of the data centers to have that all separate. So, you know, lights out management, so you can restart and configure the server. Now let's take a quick look over here at running Zen server and Zen orchestra on it. So it runs perfectly fine. I haven't had any issues. I've got my Windows Server 2019 lab set up on here, and we'll actually pull this up. This is ScreenConnect, so it makes it easier to get to. Now, what I want to show is, put a little load on the server. So I'm actually going to log into a couple of other VMs that are running on here. So we've got these VMs, we'll expand them out a little bit. And we'll kick off some things for it to do and load up the IO a bit, just to give it a quick test and look at how things are working. So this will set up a bunch of FIO jobs and a bunch of random read and writes. I have a PG bench running over here, and this is running also at the same time some other benchmarks, which one was this IO zone, I think by Veronica. So I got these all taking up some background processes and hammering the server. And at the same time, Windows is running out. So you can see this here, we'll go over here to storage, local storage. And it's having even with these little things, and here's what we kicked off here, we're at about 1920,000 IOPS IO wait time, so you know, reasonably low on this, so it's not starving for disc rights. And with all this study information, I know there's lies, dam lies and benchmarks, I'm not gonna spend too much time on it, but the server's not choking at all on this. Matter of fact, let's go ahead and open up something in Google Chrome. Is there a browser benchmark we can run? Nothing is, you know, we'll just run this too. So we can show that that's working. Then we'll tell the server to load some new roles. Let's go ahead and add some roles and features on here. Next, next, let's load some active directory services. There we go. And you can see the server is still snappy running perfectly fine. Matter of fact, we'll cancel out of that. Is this kickoff so I wasn't running the start test on here, but you're getting the idea that even with all of this running at the same time, the server's not choking on it. So I guess I'm not going to spend too much time bench cranking it because there's so many variables, but for the most part, I will say that, yes, it is handled everything we've thrown at it, we're actually doing some compiling of the Zen orchestra source on here and that worked really well. So my overall feeling is about the Super Micro 1029 WTRT server is it works well. We haven't really had any issues with it. We've been testing it for a solid week, but that's kind of the part for the course for a lot of Super Micro servers. I don't think they get enough fanfare compared to some of the other bigger names out there, but they do make a really solid piece of equipment. We've always found them to be very reliable. We have a lot of clients that do have these installed in racks, not this particular model, but similar Super Micros. And as I said at the beginning of the video, I do have my Super Micro server. We've been running for a number of years that handles, well, this video here and all my videos are currently stored on it. I've always sought them to be quite reliable. And you know, despite not having a real fancy looking update or things like that, because my old server really looks very much like this very brand new server. I'm okay with that though. Only minor complaint, like I said, the entire complaint I have on this is just the way the little plenums work on there. I think they're a little bit nicer on my older Super Micro, but maybe these smaller versions of it just don't have the same type of nice removal plenums. That's why they just for to keep them thin, they stick them on there, but that's a really minor complaint. I don't really see it as ends as well. But I'll leave a link to this at Super Micro's website. And thank you. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. If you'd like to hire us, head over to laurancesystems.com, fill out our contact page, and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on. 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