In an effort to downsize even more my home lab from Shuttle PCs that were (in the past) considered compact I decided to explore the impressive, powerfull and small GMKTec mini PCs. With NVMe drives there is no longer need for space for spinning 3.5″ drives. The following were my requirements and it GMKTec K8 Plus ticked all the boxes:
- compact
- decent upgradable memory support (2x DDR5 SODIMM – 2×48 GB, maybe up to 128 GB with the new 64 GB density SODIMM) – watch out for models with solderred LPDDR RAM
- AMD processor with lots of CPU cores (8 cores, 16 threads) – without the Intel E core nonsense that vSphere does not support
- 2×2.5 GBE Intel networking (avoid Realtek as that is not supported in vSphere)
- multiple NVMe slots
- cheap with barebone options
This particular mini PC has 2 PCI4 NVMe drive slots. However it also has an additional WiFi M.2 key slot which I decided to use for a boot drive. Booting off of USB or SD Card is really no longer an option and since you do not need WiFi on an ESXi host nor high speed for the boot disk, the WiFi M.2 slot seems ideal.
On Ebay you can purchase very cheap M.2 KEY A E to M.2 NVME KEY M SSD Adapter WIFI Wireless Network Card Slot, which works quite well.
I am using WD_BLACK SN850X 2TB SSD for storage (vSAN ESA or local VMFS), Kingston FURY Renegade 512 GB SSD for memory tiering and cheap Toshiba(Kioxia) 256GB PCIe NVMe 2230 SSD as a boot device.
Internals of an empty GMKTec K8 Plus – on the left you can see the WiFi card which is below one of the NVMe slots.
I was worried if the M.2 adapter will fit but it does quite nicely. The picture below shows M.2 adapter resized to 2230 length inside the WiFi slot.
Above – boot drive inserted in the adapter.
Below – regular NVMe inserted in the slot above the WiFi slot. You can see only slight bend due to the highth of the adapter.
And here you can see fully fitted internals with all 3 drives and memory. In the right bottom corner is the unplugged WiFi card which I just stashed there if ever needed in the future.
Currently I am running vSphere 8.0U3 and all major hardware components were identified correctly.
With the experimental memory tiering enabled you can see almost 500 GB of memory reported in vSphere client.
While the 2TB NVMe drive can be used for ESA vSAN storage that will also eat away 32 GB of RAM. So I am currently using it for local VMFS datastore in combination with iSCSI datastores from my QNAP TS-h973AX.
I have also briefly tested beta build of the next major ESXi version and again all major hardware components were identified correctly.
The mini PC is suprisingly quiet (with balanced power policy). The 2.5 GB Mikrotik switch is actually louder. Here you can see both in my mini rack.
