The folks over at SimplyNUC has recently launched an exciting new Edge-focused product line called the extremeEDGE (EE) Servers and I recently had the opportunity to try out their latest 3000 Series (3rd generation of their EE platform) in my homelab for some testing.
SimplyNUC has been a long time partner/reseller of the popular Intel NUC platform for quite some time but over the past few years, they have expanded their portfolio to include additional 4x4 systems that are completely designed in-house by SimplyNUC include Topaz, Ruby, Cypress and Chapel Rock to just name a few.
Moonstone is the latest 4x4 addition from SimplyNUC, which is an AMD-based kit that includes support for the latest AMD Zen 4 (Phoenix) and Zen 3+ (Rembrandt R) processors. The VMware Community has always been interested in an AMD-based kit but typically they do not work well due to the presence of a Realtek-based network adaptor, where drivers from Realtek does not exists for ESXi.
The first thing that caught my attention when I first heard about Moonstone was that this was an AMD kit that features an Intel-based network adapter as its primary network interface! 😲
This definitely took me by surprise, not sure if AMD was making any statements about their networking choices or simply diversifying their networking options? 🤔 Either way, I was not complaining and I thought this might be the first real viable AMD 4x4 candidate, from a VMware perspective, in quite some time.
Thanks to the SimplyNUC team, I did not have to wonder much more and I got the opportunity to put the Moonstone through its paces and see what it can do for the VMware Community!
Interested in trying out the latest release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.0? Don't have some beefy hardware to meet all the requirements, not to worry! Did you know you can actually deploy a VCF Management Domain using just a single Intel NUC or simliar small form factor system? This is exactly how I kicked the tires with the latest VCF 5.0 release 😎
Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.
Note: While my experiment used an Intel NUC, any system that meets the basic requirements above should also work.