However, upon closer inspection, it looks like the system only supports a single M.2 (M-Key) which is the traditional M.2 SSD devices you would purchase for a platform like the Intel NUC (lower left hand corner of the picture). This is actually greats news for those in the market for a small form factor systems that is officially supported by VMware, especially useful for ROBO or Edge-based deployment where space and cost is usually a constraint. The other reason is that there are actually a number of supported M.2 NVMe devices listed on VMware's HCL which you can find here. When I first heard about the E300-9D platform, I was excited for the platform as it listed support for up to two M.2 devices, which would match what the Intel NUC Hades Canyon supported.

This is not an endorsement for MITXPC, but recommend folks to compare all prices when shopping online, especially as today is Black Friday in the US and Cyber Monday is just a few days away. As an aside, when doing a quick search online, they also seem to be the only ones actually selling the E300-9D (8-Core) system which you can find here and in general, they seem to be priced fairly competitively. In fact, they even provided a nice vGhetto promo discount code for my readers awhile back, so definitely check it out if you are in the market for a new lab. I was very fortunate to get my hands on a loaner E300-9D (8-Core) unit, thanks to Eric and his team at MITXPC, a local bay area shop specializing in embedded solutions. The E200-8D is also a supported platform by VMware, you can find the VMware HCL listing here. Supermicro kits such as the E200-8D is a very popular platform amongst the VMware community and with powerful Xeon-based CPUs and support for up to 128GB of memory, it is perfect for running a killer vSphere/vSAN setup!Įarlier this Fall, Supermicro released a 'big daddy' version to the E200-8D, dubbed E300-9D and specifically, I want to focus on the 8-Core model ( SYS-E300-9D-8CNTP) as this system actually listed on the VMware HCL for ESXi! The E300-9D can support up to half a terabyte of memory and with the 8-Core model, you have access to 16 threads.

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