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THE_COMPANY
Contributor
Contributor

Question regarding Supermicro compatibility

Hello all,

we are planning to deploy the following VMware certified Supermicro system: AS-1114S-WN10RT with VMware 7.0 U2 and vSAN 14.

Unfortunately, the hard drives of type Intel P4610 included in this system are not available in desired capacity for purchase.

For this reason, we would like to run the system with the following hard drives: Micron 7300 Pro, these hard drives are VMware certified.

Additionally, we would upgrade to AMD Epyc Milan based CPUs and add a second NIC (Mellanox ConnectX-4 25G), which are also certified.

Basically, this raises the following key question and concern: What restrictions in support and what restrictions of a technical nature must one expect if all the individual components are certified, but the system as an "all-in-one system" is not.

We have to mention that Supermicro is set as manufacturer and a possible alternative would be not to rely on VMware.

We need to understand what disadvantages and problems we might encounter in case of support requests and are very much looking forward to an answer on this.

Thank you in advance!

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4 Replies
depping
Leadership
Leadership

As long as your servers and NICs are on the vSphere compatibility list and the Flash devices are supported for vSAN (check vSAN HCL) then you should be good. People typically prefer the  vSAN Ready Node configurations as that makes things easier and provides some kind of insurance that the components are certified

srodenburg
Expert
Expert

Been using Supermicro for years. When you make sure that the Motherboard (Chipset, CPU), the NICs, HBA, all the Firmwares and drivers and the  Flashdevices etc. are on the vSAN HCL, there will be no support issues. VMware has you fully covered and the vSAN "Skyline" health-check will be "all green".

As Duncan said, when you go the Ready Node route, all of this was done for you. But you can achieve the same level of software-supportability from VMware with a build-your-own platform.

THE_COMPANY
Contributor
Contributor

Thank you, that is really helpful.

All of the single components are in the vSAN HCL.

In the years you've been using VMware + Supermicro, have you had any problems with firmware updates or are there any other drawbacks we really need to know about?

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srodenburg
Expert
Expert

None. Firmware updates of LSI HBA's are not related to SuperMicro (LSI / Broadcom / Avago) and neither are NIC upgrades (Intel). I had to upgrade a Motherboard integrated 10gig NIC firmware once (and only once). So I sent an email to SuperMicro support, got the FW download link and done. Easy.