Pink pendrive story

Last few weeks passed under the sign of pink pendrive which I use it to boot discoverer. I've got many questions asking "do you recommend this setup?" Yes, I do - short answer (by the way, I'm not sponsored by anyone :-)). Long answer below. I decided to write this quick summary even though I'm not 100% complete yet still missing a few components (mostly disk drives, BMC controller and memory), but I think that I've gone through the hardest part and finally there is something to share.

CASE

I can say only good things about the case I've bought. Not too heavy (like my previous one, Chieftec Dragon), but still top quality. Looks good even in living room :-)
Air filters at every inlet do a great job - even though after the month its still not 24/7, there is already quite a bit of dust on them. Otherwise It would be collected inside.

Next great thing about this case I'd like to emphasize is that it has great cable management - you don't have almost any cables inside the chassis (they're all on the back). This is also good for cooling. PSU placement on the bottom is definitely great idea.

        

PSU
So far I haven't put heavy load on this box, but with all my VM up & running (ESXi, vCenter, FreeNAS, 2x nested ESXi) doing nothing it consumes about 52W of energy. I've never seen more than 120-130W. Looks like my 550W PSU is a little bit overkill, but to be honest, today I'd go for same one. It has all safety measures, plus modular cabling - this is definitely worth its price! One more thing about PSU itself- before you buy it - it's definitely worthwhile to checkout the length of the cables - I got lucky and they were just as long as I needed. 1cm less and I'd be in trouble.

COOLING

Case itself was equipped with 2 140mm coolers - one on the front and second on the back of the chassis. Quite silent, but airflow takes its sound. 

Additionally I have one cooler inside PSU and obviously my favorite second one on the CPU - cooling not only CPU itself but as you can see on the image - memory too! There are air filters in every inlet of the case, and surprisingly there is a lot of dust on them, provided that It does not run 24h yet. In terms of silentness - everybody is different and have different expectations. As I said, I didn't have the opportunity to make this cpu hot yet. Anyways, so far its quite silent - normally you wouldn't notice it is even running. In the night when it's really quiet - you will hear the fans, but it's not really annoying. My MBPR is actually more noisy when it starts its coolers.

MAINBOARD

Reliable server building block? So far so good, but story here is a little bit more complicated. Overall - I think I'm pretty much happy with this mainboard even it's not perfect (do you know perfect one? :-))

One of my biggest disappointments was management NIC because i don't (and I don't wanna have) monitor/keyboard to manage it locally when needed and it wasn't stated clearly that you need to buy additional module to support it. Another one is that only 2 out of 6 SATA ports are SATA3 interfaces.
On the flip side - mainboard is fully supported by VMware. I managed to run nested ESXi with 64bit nested VMs. I run Wake on Lan and PXE boot and both works just fine.

Pros:

+ Small form factor
+ 256GB of memory support w/single CPU on 32G DIMMS
+ two RAID controllers on-board
+ management ethernet on-board (but works only with external BMI add-on)
+ two real GE nics (connected to PCI-E) w/PXE support
+ additional mangement GE NIC
+ support for BMI
+ serial console support

Cons:
- BMI must be purchased separately (about $50) and without this your management NIC doesn't work
- Only two SATA3 out of 6 total slots
- Only RAID1/0 support on-board, for RAID5 you must buy additional Asus PIKE card (fits only into special slot on mother board)
- Really stupid and annoying one-side dimm latch. Might be OK if you want to add your memory once, but provided my troubles with memory support - a nightmare
- No external USB3.0 connector - forget about your front panel blue USBs


CPU
So far most expensive part of all this venture. Most likely to be dethroned by memory in the future. Just to mention - It's Intel Xeon E5-2690-v2 doing really only NOP's here. Nothing really much to say except looks like it's huge overkill and only one thing which could possibly justify this CPU is 768G (YAY!) memory support. Currently there is no more than 64GB memory support in any Intel high-end desktop CPU. My main board supports 256G and I bought it for a reason. Hitting this limit with this CPU is only a matter of time and budget.


MEMORY
Nothing really much to say here except after a little bit of struggling it works (all 16igs). But unfortunately it looks like 16Gb of memory is sufficient enough only for ESXi, vCenter and FreeNAS. I just ordered another 64Gigs. Watch out for update.

STORAGE
So far it doesn't really exists. My old good 500GB usb drive turned out to be as slow as pendrive. So I've gone for another solution - 256Gig SSD for critical data and 2x4TB SATA3 drives in RAID0 for capacity. Trying not to spoil my next story - SSD was already delivered and I have decided to test its performance having some interesting results while I still wait for SATA delivery.

SUMMARY
After all - Looks like it was worth it and everything seems to work nicely. I'm gonna also order this BMC kit as I don't like the idea to connect via the serial console every time I want to change bios setting (local console doesn't work through this serial console at all) and I'd love to have remote KVM in case of disaster. Still waiting for memory & drives, to be finally able to run something useful. And yeah. I owe you pink pendrive true story. Well, I bought it few years ago for my wife. Apparently she haven't used it even once. :-)

Any thoughts or questions? Feel encouraged to comment!