I haven't worked with SuperMicro (aside from having it inside "appliance" devices that I've worked adjacent to), but I assume my experience with Dell and HP commodity servers are similar.
The thick layer of hardware contrivances necessary to maintain IBM PC compatibility is unnecessary for the task of bulk hosting of x86/x64 VMs. There's a lot of hardware and software that just doesn't need to be there.
Bare metal out-of-band management ends up being bolted-on to these "legacy" contrivances (scraping video memory for remote consoles, faking being USB peripherals). A serial console or SSH connection to a service processor would be vastly superior. I can't begin to count how many times an iDRAC "lied" to me about issues with a machine, or how many times the solution was "upgrade the iDRAC firmware and reboot it".
I have been mostly unimpressed with the quality of firmware for motherboards, baseboard management controllers, RAID adapters, NICs, HBAs, power supplies, backplanes, front panels, etc. Every new model of system or component ends up being an exercise in fear / anticipation of problems. The integrator has very little power over the firmware quality and I can be assured that if I do have a firmware-induced issue I'm many, many steps away from actually communicating with somebody who can help.
Granted, maybe if I was buying at the scale of Oxide's prospective Customers I'd have some pull with the integrators, but I'm skeptical of that, even.
Oxide is actually building computers. Putting commodity motherboards into boxes with other commodity components won't ever have the level of attention to detail and integration that Oxide can provide.
The thick layer of hardware contrivances necessary to maintain IBM PC compatibility is unnecessary for the task of bulk hosting of x86/x64 VMs. There's a lot of hardware and software that just doesn't need to be there.
Bare metal out-of-band management ends up being bolted-on to these "legacy" contrivances (scraping video memory for remote consoles, faking being USB peripherals). A serial console or SSH connection to a service processor would be vastly superior. I can't begin to count how many times an iDRAC "lied" to me about issues with a machine, or how many times the solution was "upgrade the iDRAC firmware and reboot it".
I have been mostly unimpressed with the quality of firmware for motherboards, baseboard management controllers, RAID adapters, NICs, HBAs, power supplies, backplanes, front panels, etc. Every new model of system or component ends up being an exercise in fear / anticipation of problems. The integrator has very little power over the firmware quality and I can be assured that if I do have a firmware-induced issue I'm many, many steps away from actually communicating with somebody who can help.
Granted, maybe if I was buying at the scale of Oxide's prospective Customers I'd have some pull with the integrators, but I'm skeptical of that, even.
Oxide is actually building computers. Putting commodity motherboards into boxes with other commodity components won't ever have the level of attention to detail and integration that Oxide can provide.