Supermicro 7048A-T

For at least 5 years (I honestly don’t recall when I put the box together…) there’s a been an Antec Mini P180 purring under my desk. This machine has been running various flavors & versions of Linux, mainly performing as KVM host.
This box contains 4 hard drives, and a Intel Q9400S CPU. (For those who don’t recall: the ‘S’ suffix means lower powered (65W TDP instead of 95W TDP).

For a while I’ve been considering replacing this unit. The replacement has to be equally quiet, good for at least 5 years to come, and easy expandable. And… dual CPU, if possible.
There are not many PC producers who build dual CPU workstations. There’s the Dell Precision Tower 7810, the HP Z820 and… Supermicro.

Supermicro SYS-7048A-T
Supermicro X10DAi
And Supermicro is where I ended up. I was first eyeballing the 7047A-T, but was then informed about the Supermicro 7048A-T which has just been released.

After some debating with myself I decided on the following specs:

nameamountprod. nr.
CPUIntel® Xeon® Processor E5-2620 v32CM8064401831400
RAMSamsung 8GB DDR4 2133MHz 1Gx4 ECC/Reg 1,2V8M393A1G40DB0-CPB
StorageIntel SSD DC S3500 - 80GB 2.5" MLC SATA 6Gb/s 7.0mm2SSDSC2BB080G4
VideoSapphire Radeon HD 5450 1GB DDR3
PCI-Express 2.0, DVI-I, HDMI, VGA, Lite-Retail, w/ LP bracket
111166-02-20R

I’ll be slapping some of my existing hard drives in there, but I haven’t decided yet on how many or in what configuration so the final storage space is pending.
This new system will have 4x the amount of RAM of my previous system and it will be at least twice as fast (due to it being a 2 CPU system).

The order has been placed with the good people at Nextron, and they expect to ship it on September 19th.

The only thing I’m not 100% sure of yet is how quiet it is… All Supermicro says is: ‘Whisper Quiet Workstation’. Does anyone know how loud the Supermicro employees whisper? 😎

[more to come]

13 thoughts on “Supermicro 7048A-T”

  1. Pingback: A VM-host with minimum overhead

  2. I just received 5 of these today.. Trying to boot Oracle OVS 2.2.3 or OVS 3.3.3 version.. I burned the ISO to a usb stick.. Looks like its a raw disk file.. When I try and boot it the machine never comes alive.. Yet OEL and ubuntu works just fine same process. What is the command to get the BIOS? Is it the DEL key.. Can’t seem to get it to come up. No text ever displays on monitor. Not sure by default this was turned off.. Please help.

    1. Hi Gary,

      [del] is indeed the key which gets you into the BIOS. I’m not familiar with Oracle OVS. Have you tried booting from the USB stick you made with another PC? Perhaps the image on your USB stick is simply not bootable?

  3. Complementing the informations of my previous post:

    In the Setup Utility, opened pressing Del key during the startup process, I have a message:

    ERROR: Insuficient PCI Resources Detected !!!

    Is this related to a hardware malfunction ?

      1. That works ! Thank you. During the start process, now I can see the HDs informations, two lines for ATA
        devices.
        But now the installation doesn’t start with debian 8.1.0 dvd installer. I see that the media is loaded and the message isolinux … Peter anvil… etc etc is displayed but then the screen becomes dark and, after a while, if I press “Enter” the DVD spins again, but nothing happends.

        1. You’re welcome 😎

          Hmm, Debian 8 I haven’t meddled with yet, but in the past it some times helped to give the nodmraid boot parameter. This may have been solely on Ubuntu systems though. I don’t recall right now…

  4. Hi Evert,
    after a few years installing linux in my own workstations, this is the first time that I find such a problem…

    Using Debian installer, the system freezes before I can see anything, but Ubuntu is a little bit different.
    One example:
    Ubuntu dvd is loaded, then I see on the screen the options:

    Try Ubuntu
    and
    Install Ubuntu

    If I choose the second option, the next screen tells me that the system should have either a internet connection or at least 6.5 GB of space in HD. The problem is that I have 2HDs with 2TB each
    (no RAID).

    The installer is not able to find the HDs. Is there a specific BIOS configuration to make this work ?

    Thank you very much.

  5. Hi.
    I have a new 7048A-T too and was wondering if you could give me a tip regarding Debian linux
    installation on it. I tried Ubuntu 14.04 and Debian 8.1 but the installation process doesn’t start
    properly. Using the UBUNTU dvd it is able to show me the live version of the system, but when I
    choose install it never goes further…

    Is there a special configuration on BIOS in order to make the install to work ?
    I am sorry for my begginer’s questions.

    Thank you in advance.

    1. Hi Ricardo,

      How far does the installation get? Does it just freeze up, or do you get an error message?
      What is your disk configuration like? Hardware RAID, or software RAID?

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