I’ve been following along with everyone jumping on the train of these new Miniforum MS-A2 PCs that are out there and I dived in to purchase 6 of these now to try them out with the new VMware Cloud Foundation version 9 and after doing a recent rebuild I started to notice that my Intel NUCs just didn’t have the horsepower I wanted for a infrastructure cluster and also the 10GB Thunderbolt adapters that I was running started to have issues on a couple of hosts.
So with the recent challenges and all the talk about the MS-A2s out there, I have purchased the below:
| (Qty 3) MS-A2 AMD Ryzen 9 7940HX with Radeon Graphics | Purpose: VCF 9 management domain |
| (Qty 3) MS-A2 AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX with Radeon Graphics | Purpose: VCF9 workload domain, Kubernetes and possible Private AI |
I am going to be following along with William Lam’s VCF 9 in a box build for the most part except I am only putting 96GB of RAM in my workload hosts due mostly to the increased costs of the DDR5 5600 SODIMM ram out there and with memory tiering in ESXi now I can subtract some of the physical memory.
I have the MS-A2 7940HX installed in my rack already and running VCF 9, still waiting on the MS-A2 9955HXs to show up.
Here is the new layout, been using my 3d printer a ton lately to print out mounts for this setup.
I will dive deeper into this new setup, I know it wasn’t very long ago when I talked a rebuild and I’m already changing things up but that is how it goes with technology sometimes. Out with the old and in with the new.