Sep 11, 2025, 16:06

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 16:06:52 +0000
supermicro, amd, epyc, illumos, omnios, intertech

I'm building a new EPYC Rome node for my home data center, trying to figure out if OmniOS can run everything I want. The last component just arrived and the machine is memtesting right now.

Over the years I've ran mostly ESXi and I've also tried to love (but didn't) Proxmox. My new node has a twin sister with a Skylake Xeon, running Fedora. If everything goes to plan the twin can be migrated to OmniOS later too.

Some specs:
- Inter-Tech 4U-4408 storage chassis
- Supermicro H11SSL-i motherboard
- AMD EPYC 7302P CPU (16 cores)
- 8x 16 GB DDR4 3200 ECC RDIMM (Samsung)
- 1x 2 TB M.2 NVMe WD SN700
- 2x 16 TB HDD Toshiba MG09

This motherboard is a little funny. You get two SFF-8643 connectors, but there's no SAS chip, so you can only break them out to SATA. Suits me fine for this build, the chassis backplanes happily take SFF-8643 too. The H11SSL-i motherboard is alright. EPYC Rome also fits a H12SSL-i which would get me PCIe 4.0, but the price for the motherboard + CPU combo would have doubled and I don't really need it for this build.

The Inter-Tech (German brand) chassis are pretty nice for affordable DIY builds. 4U is sweet because you can use regular ATX PSU's and fit heat sinks with fans that don't sound like jet engines. The heat sink I have now is a "CooNong" (? bless me) that I got with the motherboard. Looks like a clone of the same style that Supermicro sells. It came with the most crappy fan humanity ever laid eyes on so I promptly fitted a Noctua like the rest of the fans. As usual, motherboard warns about fan speeds being too low, expecting high RPM data center fans, but temps are otherwise fine. At least there's no audible warning for the fan speeds on this motherboard. The result: you can actually work right next to the machine.