The eagle has landed. I was finally able to finish the build of my AI rig - without GPU for now. I will explain later.

Final specs

Without long overdue this is the final built:

Type Part Name
Motherboard Supermicro H13SSL-N
CPU AMD EPYC 9124
Memory 64GB DDR5 ECC (2 x 32GB)
Chassis Sliger CX4200a
Chassis 4U Rear Exhaust Fan Mounting Bracket 120mm
Chassis Front Fan 3x Noctua NF-A12x25 PWM
Chassis Rear Fan Noctua NF-A12x25 PWM
CPU Fan ARCTIC Freezer 4U-SP5
PSU Seasonic PRIME TX-1600
Boot/OS storage 2x Samsung 990 PRO NVMe M.2 SSD, 2 TB, PCIe 4.0
Data Storage 2x 3TB SATA HDD

Build

It was fairly smooth sail. I have put so much effort into planing, reading and researching that the most of the built was pretty much done in one afternoon. Open the chassis, install all 4 fans, put in motherboard risers, attach M.2s to the motherboard, put in motherboard, plug in power supply, put in harddrives and connect everything up. Done. It would be nice to just power it on and see what happens but I was missing memories due to long lead times. That didn’t stop me so I wanted to test if I can at least connect to BMC (Supermicro out of band)…And I could. So if you ever wonder would I be able to connect to BMC without memories the answer is yes.

It looks like lead times for server graded DDR5 memories are currently in weeks so after 2+ weeks of waiting I had my memories and was able to power it up. And it came up without any issues! Massive success.

Hypervisor

I have done lots of thinking during waiting for my memories what hypervisor I will go for. I was considering Ubuntu KVM and Proxmox and in the end went for Proxmox. I felt like hypervisor configuration and operation is something where I want to spend minimum time and Proxmox does that. It is running on Ubuntu and after playing little bit with it is offering flexibility of Ubuntu with some extra features like nice GUI. Definitely recommend it.

Running it

I have started on Friday night and after few hours on Saturday and Sunday I was able to configure hypervisor, install web server and basic monitoring so I could migrate my couple of AWS servers on my new home server including this blog. I have even managed to set up backups on my NAS.

What next?

I still have to migrate my personal mail server from AWS which means I can shutdown my whole AWS environment. I will work on design deploying Kubernetes cluster where I’m planing to eventually migrate my web server and make it ready for the future AI experiments. After I will have this I will start looking on things like rack and obviously GPU. I think the server (but mainly my wallet) will be ready for the GPU towards the end of October.