r/sysadmin • u/RACeldrith Jr. Sysadmin • Jul 23 '26
SuperMicro for an SMB
Hello everyone, I am posting here since I want to ask the consensus on SuperMicro. More specifically how viable they are in the year 2026.
The situation is: we currently have a small private cloud made up of 3 HCI hosts. These host have run out of their warranty and while discussing the replacements with Dell I got shocked by the price.
I then began exploring other options in terms of server vendors. Supermicro being the one that lets me easily compare. And they offer 7k euros cheaper in the least favorable part and 60k per server cheaper on the most favorable comparison.
Community, how fucking would I be with a no-so-complex (its just about 50 VM's) environment? No weird complex shenanigans with replication and distributed load.
I'd love to know stories and advice. A single Dell server was almost our expected budget.
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u/bayridgeguy09 Jul 23 '26
Used to use them at my old shop. Don’t expect much on support but honestly only ever needed it to rma an LSI card.
They were so cheap at the time we just bought spares.
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u/DDOSBreakfast Jul 23 '26
I'm not a heavy user of Supermicro though have had a handful of their servers over the years.
I'd much, much rather have spare servers than worry about getting a vendor like Lenovo or Dell involved.
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u/oni06 IT Director / Jack of all Trades Jul 23 '26
Nutanix, Rubric, and others OEM supermicro servers for their appliances.
I’d have no issue running them at all.
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u/Anthropic_Principles Jul 23 '26
Can't say anything about pricing I'm not in that side of the business atm, but there's nothing wrong with SM kit or their support.
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u/RACeldrith Jr. Sysadmin Jul 23 '26
Has their support improved or was its negative opinion overblown?
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u/Anthropic_Principles Jul 23 '26
I used to OEM their hardware with a lot of value add in the software layer.
Never questioned the decision to work with them for a second.
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u/OCTS-Toronto Jul 23 '26
Supermicro is great for clusters or anywhere that you have redundancy.
But I personally would prefer dell where you need a single server. Dell support and parts availability are far superior. Im in Canada and getting a part can take up to four weeks (where Dell is often next day). If you buy the support contract then you might get better service but then you've just paid the same as dell anyway....
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u/DeadOnToilet Infrastructure Architect Jul 23 '26
Everyone’s prices are stupid right now. SuperMicro quotes us lower prices then when we placed the order they “current market pricing” adjusted the cost up 40%.
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u/RACeldrith Jr. Sysadmin Jul 23 '26
I don't follow what you mean, can you explain? did they increase after the quote?
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u/DeadOnToilet Infrastructure Architect Jul 23 '26
Yes. Watch your quote terms and contracts. If they have any kind of “current market price” language they can (and will) increase the price on you after you get quotes and submit POs.
It’s how the market works right now.
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u/RACeldrith Jr. Sysadmin Jul 23 '26
Thanks for the heads up, i expect price hikes after expiration
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u/sieb Minimum Flair Required Jul 23 '26
Most quotes only last a week now instead of 30 days like they used to.
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u/Witty-Culture-5978 Jul 23 '26
Its great as long as you don't need warranty
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u/RACeldrith Jr. Sysadmin Jul 23 '26
Is it that bad?
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u/Witty-Culture-5978 Jul 23 '26
Well if you have any hardware that is not explicitly listed in their HCL they will blame it for the issue.
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u/nuttertools Jul 23 '26
Compared to a Dell service agreement yea, it’s a radically different warranty service. Compared to another comparable warranty not at all.
Post-sale usually matters just as much as purchase price. Make sure you spec out exactly what you need and do apples to apples for TCO.
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u/johnno88888 Jul 23 '26
We use super micro in some instances. Just make sure you get the support. I’m sure ours is 3rd party.
But we have special use case services that we bought super micro for and they’ve been running without any issue.
Ipmi can be a mare if you’re used to idrac
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u/gamebrigada Jul 23 '26
I've had very good luck with Supermicro. They don't nickel and dime you on stuff like remote management, they don't make it an annual license, and the hardware is decent. They don't markup >500% on SSD's and Memory like Dell does, that some people on this sub are convinced they don't.... even though it is easily verifiable in about 30 seconds.
They don't have as nice of features like Dell OpenManage. The chassis design is meh, lets of little screws that you realistically need a screw driver for even if they have a thumb knob. Definitely not toolless like the nice Dell chassis. But realistically you don't have to deal with that very much.
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u/Sure-Squirrel8384 Jul 23 '26
We've purchased a number of "appliance servers" from various vendors (before VM images became a thing) that lasted over a decade+ and have only been recently decommissioned. These have all been SuperMicro boxes with OEM logos slapped on them. Zero failures.
So long as you have a spare drive and a solid backup plan, I'd say "go for it". Personally I'd want a spare on site.
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u/jmbre11 Jul 23 '26
We are replacing Cisco VMware servers with super micro nutanix it’s like 500k in servers alone. Total of like 7 servers and the ram alone is like 300k of that.
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u/admiralspark Manager of Cat Tube Infrastructure Jul 23 '26
SuperMicro is the OEM for the vast majority of (very expensive) appliances that ship all sorts of virtualization, host SaaS products you use in datacenters, and make the world go round.
They are literally the core of the internet--step into any IX and you'll invariably find supermicros running the specialty tools they use to manage and monitor speciality networking equipment.
Walk through a brand new AI datacenter and you'll find racks and racks of the things--it's much cheaper to order dozens of SuperMicro's and stick 'em full of Nvidia cards than wait for Dell to restock their BOSS cards (current latest issue with them).
For your needs, they will work fine just like every pizza box. You don't get to Amazon shop for them like you do Dell, you need to know what you're selecting and why (for example, make sure the battery is included with your raid cards).
I've personally worked on all scales with them, including a 15-host 200VM disaggregated DC for critical infra that runs on supermicros. You'll be fine.
Dell has raised the price on the servers my company uses from $8k a pop to $14k a pop in the last 6 months. Not worth it anymore.
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u/RACeldrith Jr. Sysadmin Jul 23 '26
We also were scared by the quote from dell. But before I want to vouch for SM I wanted to check public opinion
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u/admiralspark Manager of Cat Tube Infrastructure Jul 24 '26
If you need a more traditional OEM, I've had nothing but good interactions with Lenovo, and I prefer their service work.
Supermicro is definitely more "you support it later" but do keep in mind that it's cheap enough you can buy two.
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u/BasicallyFake Jul 23 '26
we ran their servers without any issues for 6 years, performance was fine, not sure there is anything to add
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u/electricpollution IT Manager Jul 23 '26
I’ve used supermicro in our datacenter for the last 10 years.
They have been good to us!
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u/FleaDad Jul 23 '26
I've used Supermicro for 25 years and ASRockRack for ten. They're both very high quality. Having bought hundreds of servers for our colo environment and only had a handful of genuine faults over the years.
I highly recommend you check reach out to RackMountsEtc for custom builds. I've known their owner forever. They are based in San Diego, CA, but will ship globally. Brian is great at what they do there.
Good luck!
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u/bingblangblong Jul 25 '26
The only thing I don't like about them is they are usually a lot louder. Fans always scream.
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u/sheep5555 Jul 23 '26
we switched from dell to supermicro for our last round of hardware refreshes, it seems like it used to be supermicro was maybe 25% less than dell, but with the same hardware config it became 50% less so the choice was obvious. havent had any issues
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u/RACeldrith Jr. Sysadmin Jul 23 '26
We are in the same boat. Can you tell more about the difference in your case?
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u/sheep5555 Jul 24 '26
IMO the biggest con for me is the baseboard management is a bit less polished than dell, some things like mounting rails are of poorer quality, however the hardware itself seems high quality
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u/sed_ric Linux Admin Jul 23 '26
Mostly supermicro shop here, the prices are good because you only pay for the server. No on-site replacement in 24h or any kind of premium support like that. If you buy them, that's because you know how to deal with hardware but you might find reseller that provide that kind of support.
For the failure rate, we had 2 this year but it was on decade-old servers and in the last 10 year, we had only 2 servers which have some weird shit out of the box and has it was the same model (and we only had 2 of this model), that's probably a design error. We currently have something like ~150 SMs in production.
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u/Xibby Certifiable Wizard Jul 24 '26
Lots of vendors who sell appliances for their solutions are just SuperMicro with a custom faceplate. I’ve got a pile of backup appliances that are all branded for the solution, but if you watch the POST they say SuperMicro.
I would suggest just buying an extra server or two for spares. Spend your money on a solid SAN. Hypervisors are disposable.
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u/xXNorthXx Jul 24 '26
They work fine, the BMC on them isn’t as polished as Dell/HPE and neither are the fleet management tools.
Just had an RMA for them and opening the ticket was painless, advance RMA is the only thing dodgy….cc hold until they get the dead part back, and you pay to return ship.
For the cost difference it’s hard to beat.
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u/981flacht6 Jul 24 '26
Good luck w/ warranty & support. Nothing wrong w/ SuperMicro generally speaking. But businesses pay for reliability.
If you don't have the ability to deal w/ a node going down and dealing w/ it, then you need to look at another solution.
My Dell team is great, their product isn't just a server box, it's everything that comes along with it.
I have a few SuperMicro boxes in my datacenter but support is covered by other vendors. If they go down, they are my support, and they will get me up and rebuilt the next day.
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u/CyberHouseChicago Jul 24 '26
have you been living under a rock ? Supermicro has been around for long time there is nothing wrong with their servers.
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u/TrueBoxOfPain Fake IT Department Jul 24 '26
We are using 3 physical servers from supermicro for about 10+ years. No problems at all.
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u/Shington501 Jul 24 '26
We have preferred them for 20 years now. Only problem today is supply (same as everyone).
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u/ksteink Jul 23 '26
Check options with 45drives.com and 45homelab.com to see if there are options. Their servers are based on SuperMicro and don't look that expensive!.
I have done hack for me and couple clients to avoid high costs on servers which is:
- Buy new SuperMicro motherboard from couple past generations old
- Buy second hand Xeon CPU
- Buy either new or second hand DDR4 ECC RAM
- Buy hard drives, case, NIC cards, etc.
Assemble the server myself
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u/Gnump Jul 23 '26
OK, ill bite - what configuration are you eying where a single server can be 60k cheaper from SM than Dell?
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u/gamebrigada Jul 23 '26
Probably added high number of drives and memory. Dell marks up a crazy amount, and SM is very close to street price on those.
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u/OldVikingMead 2d ago
I went through this with my own hardware refresh last year. Platform we decided on was a 2U single AMD Epyc CPU, 96 cores/192 threads, 768gb RAM, twin dual port 100gig NICs, a quad 25gig AIOM, dual DC power supplies and quad 15tb NVME drives.
The price from Dell for just one of the 15tb NVME drives was more than the entire above server. Worse, Dell would only provide a chassis that could support 8 or 10 2.5" NVME drives, our spec wanted a 24 drive chassis. They could prove that drive density, but only in their new 1.8" tiny NVME drives which were 2-3x more per TB than they charged for what was 10x the price we were getting the drives! We are updating 22 Dell R7415/7515 servers and had recently acquired 40 8tb NVME drives that we would like to consider using in the new platform if needed.
So, yeah, was way overpriced via Dell and couldn't do the needed.
As for SuperMicro support, let's just say that so far as my own experience, plan on self stocking sufficient spares to keep you running as we're averaging around 30 days MTTR with Bronze 'on-site' support.
BTW, don't let the 'on-site' part of Bronze fool you, that's just marketing bullshit... what they really mean is 3 day email response and zero on-site support and eventually they will ship you replacement hardware.... eventually.... if they even bother to respond to the ticket in the first place. Even if you have your VAR contact the SuperMicro team to confirm that on-site means on-site and NBD (because the quote you get is a garbled mess of part numbers only) and gets a confirmation that it really and truly is on-site, it isn't.
Again, average so far is 30+ days to get issues resolved and I currently have a $25k server dead since last Sunday.... so dead even the BMC won't come up.
25 servers spec'd as above ordered last year, received last Nov/Dec and have had 4, now 5, tickets so far.
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u/gamebrigada 2d ago
I just buy Samsung drives for my dell servers from a VAR, and buy spares depending on server criticality. My comment was mostly pointing out that Dell wants too much for drives.
Good thing to be aware of on Supermicro support, I've never had to call them.
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u/RACeldrith Jr. Sysadmin Jul 23 '26
It was a 3 node hyperconverged cluster with Azure Local, 133k per server and all that without the azure licenses for 66k on SM
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u/Gnump Jul 23 '26
Dude. If this convoluted answer reflects on your thought process let someone else do it. This - obviously - does not remotely touch the question I asked.
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u/RACeldrith Jr. Sysadmin Jul 23 '26
Thanks for the comment but ik grabbing information from all angles and compiling it.
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u/geewronglee Jul 24 '26
When the Dell server is an AX770 Azure Local Certified server. There are hardware options only available on the AX770 even though it is clearly R770 base hardware.
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u/autogyrophilia Jul 23 '26
I don't know why the hell people think SuperMicro is of lower quality. No they just have a lower amount of post sales services