Hyperconverged Supermicro a2sdi-4c-hln4f

This howto aims at describind building a compact homelab with a hyperconverged chassis based on a Supermicro A2SDi-4C-HLN4F. The hypervisor OS will be a Slackware64-current (with Qemu/KVM for virtualization), the storage will be provided by a Truenas core VM (thanks to pci-passthrough) and network orchestrated by an OPNSense VM.

Motivations

Why such a tiny motherboard, especially with a modest 4 cores Intel Atom C3558 ? Let's see the advantages :

• obviously, it's very compact (mini-itx form factor)
• up to 256 GB ECC RDIMM RAM supported
• the CPU has a very low TDP (~ 17W), so no need for a fancy and potentially noisy cooling solution
• 4 * 1 Gb/s Ethernet ports (cool for a network appliance such as OPNSense)
• dedicated IPMI Ethernet port
• the SATA ports are provided by two distinct PCIe lines (see below, very important for pci-passthrough and no need for an additionnal HBA card)

A2SDi system block diagram

Well, the system has drawbacks too :

• the CPU power will not be extraordinary
• it's not possible to put a fan directly on top the CPU heatsink (more on that later)