TinkerTry's Xeon D-1540 fueled ESXi 6.0 home lab build begins LIVE!

Updates to this article below, including pictures, lots of pictures!

Here's an archive of the event here, then click Q&A.

Back in April 2015, you witnessed my enthusiasm over this new affordable and efficient server-class Xeon D-1500 (Broadwell-DE) processor series here:

• Intel Xeon D-1500 crams incredible virtualization lab specs into tiny mITX size, codename Broadwell-DE

Tuesday June 23rd, this elusive little animal first surfaces at Wiredzone, as you sensed my trepidation when pulling that trigger by placing my order for the very new Supermicro SuperServer 5028D-TN4T (with a Xeon D-1540 CPU inside) here:

• Supermicro SuperServer mini-tower ordered with 64GB of memory for $1900 starts the ultimate 24x7 home virtualization lab

And now, you want to join in and Google Hangout On Air, to see the fun begin.

Come on over and join me at TinkerTry LIVE tonight, Thursday June 25 2015, starting at 8pm eastern!

I plan to:

1. Unbox - Won't take long, less than 1 cubic foot total volume.
2. Design - Let's pop the hood, and have a look at the layout of the components.
3. Install Memory - Those 2 32GB DIMMs.
4. Install Storage - Stick a little M.2 storage on that bad boy mobo.
5. Power Up! - Fire this puppy up live, showing watt burn every step of the way. Yeah, new stuff takes 20 years right off me.
6. Memory Test - MemTest86 shouldn't take more than a few days to test those 64GBs ;-)
7. IPMI - While that's running, let's give IPMI's keyboard-video-mouse-over-IP feature a shot.
8. ESXi 6.0 Hypervisor - Wrap-up by getting a little VMware ESXi 6.0 installation started.

Should be fun!

Details of the Google Hangout On Air will be posted right here in this article, come on back and refresh.

See also

• Supermicro SuperServer 5028D-TN4T User's Manual
  JUN 01 2015, by Supermicro

• SUPERMICRO SYS-5028D-TN4T REVIEW SMALL BOX – BIG POWER
  MAY 13 2015, by Patrick Kennedy at Serve The Home

See also at TinkerTry

• Rufus takes seconds to create a bootable USB flash drive for ESXi installation
  SEP 10 2013, by Paul Braren at TinkerTry

• Not able to attend VMworld 2013? Join the TinkerTry "first look at ESXi 5.5" event instead, LIVE Aug 29 2013 7pm-8pm EDT
  AUG 29 2015, by Paul Braren at TinkerTry

JUN 25 2015 Update 10:27pm

JUN 26 2015 Update

The event went fairly smoothly, but the Google On Air experience is a bit confusing for the attendees, and asking questions was clumsy. Despite all that, we wound up with up to 17 folks joining the 2 hour hangout. Thank you!

I made some fun gaffes near the end, and didn't wind up covering ESXi 6.0 much, since it seemed that ESXi 6.0 didn't see the network adapters by default, but I was wrong. I was using a (unlabeled) 10GB port, which doesn't have a driver load by default. Oh well.

During the video, you'll also see the moment when I noticed that my mSATA to M.2 adapter couldn't fit: the PCI slot mechanically obstructed it. Another very minor issue was that it seemed the SATA signal cable for the top-most 2.5 drive bay was a bit short, given the way the wire tie had been assembled. I simply clipped the wire tie, all was well in the universe again. The cable reaches fine. I later installed a wire tie a little looser. Note in one picture, the mSATA drive is now in an 2.5 enclosure. This worked around the minor M.2 issue. Of course, once I get an actual M.2 SSD, it will fit on the motherboard just fine. It would seems a stand-off of some sort will be needed though, with the manual unclear on that point.

Enjoy the series of picture I took for you, with many more at STH here, a thin attempt to make up for the blurry video.