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After many months of planning and discussions, today I am excited to share the Supermicro 2021 Homelab Group Buy with the VMware Community! 🥳

A big thanks to both Supermicro and the Aspen Systems team for supporting this community initiative.

Details

This group buy is for a barebones (includes CPU) Supermicro E300-9D-8CN-8TP, which is a very capable platform for running your VMware Homelab which I have previously written about here and here. As a successor to the popular E200-8D, another benefit of the E300-9D is that it is officially listed on the VMware HCL and is supported with the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2 release.

Since this is the first time we are partnering up with both Supermicro and Aspen Systems for a group buy, we wanted to keep the program simple and initially focus on US based users. If this group buy is successful, we will work with the team to run a similar group buy for other regions such as EMEA/APJ. For this group buy, we have been able to secure a 20% discount for the VMware Community and does require a minimum quantity of 300 units to be purchased to qualify for the discounted rate. If you are interested in participating in this group buy, please visit the URL below. In addition, I will also periodically update this blog post with the latest numbers, so folks have an idea of the overall progress.

Lastly, please help get the word out by sharing this blog post with your friends, colleagues and social network!

UPDATE 3 (07/07/21) - Unfortunately, we did not meet the minimum requirements based on the final results and this group buy will NOT be proceeding. I have no plans to re-attempt this and/or future group buys as this was a non-trivial amount of work.

I also have no plans to re-attempt this for other regions, this was a non-trivial amount of work on my end and although there was a lot of "interests" from the community, it did not actually translate to folks committing. Sorry to disappoint folks who wanted this to go through, it seems the community has spoken

UPDATE 2 (06/03/21) - Shipping estimates have changed to ~12-14 weeks due to current global shortages. Group buy website has also been updated to reflect units sold, which will happen at the end of each business day.

UPDATE 1 (06/02/21) - Quantity per customer has been increased to 4

At the end of 2020, I had published a blog article which covers the latest Supermicro kits that are being used and others that can be used for both VMware Homelabs as well as for production workloads. The article was very well received, especially as this is a topic that I frequently get questions about on the latest hardware kits that will work with vSphere, vSAN and NSX-T.

While researching for the article, I had a chance to speak with the Supermicro Product Manager and I came to learn about a new E100-9W platform that was just released last Spring of 2020. This platform is part of Supermicro's Embedded IoT family of servers and focuses on use cases such as Industrial Automation, Retail, Smart Medical Systems, Kiosks and Digital Signage to name a few. Many of these use cases are also applicable to our VMware customer base, especially for running a small and lower power footprint at an Edge or ROBO location. I was also interested in this platform as it could also be interesting for VMware homelabs.

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