Infinity Sentinel Advanced | Consolidation & Memory-Intensive Virtualization Host | EPYC 9354

Once a business runs a few dozen virtual machines (several database servers, more than one Remote Desktop host, application farms and test environments), memory rather than processor speed is usually what runs out first. Infinity Sentinel Advanced is built for organisations of roughly 75 to 250 staff, multi-site businesses and departmental IT teams that want to replace a rack of older servers with one host, and for research groups running memory-heavy virtual machines. It needs a full-depth rack and planned maintenance windows.

A 32-core, 64-thread AMD EPYC 9354 with 256MB of L3 cache runs on the ASRock Rack GENOAD12M3-2Q board in the ASRock Rack 1U12L4E-GENOA/2Q chassis, with 384GB of DDR5-4800 ECC registered memory: one module on each of the processor's twelve channels (460.8 GB/s theoretical peak). Two mirrored Kingston DC2000B enterprise NVMe drives boot the host, and four Kingston DC600M 1.92TB enterprise SSDs with power-loss protection form a ZFS RAID 10 pool for virtual machines (3.84TB usable). Two 25GbE SFP28 ports connect to the core switch and backup server, a dedicated IPMI port handles remote management, and two PCIe 5.0 x16 slots and an OCP 3.0 slot remain free. Two 1000W hot-swap power supplies run 1+1 redundant.

Twelve 3.5-inch bays sit inside the chassis in a pull-out drive cage. The VM pool uses four of them, and the other eight can take four more SSDs or an eight-drive hard-drive tier (up to 144TB usable in RAIDZ2) for file data or an on-site backup repository. Because those bays are under the top cover, which ASRock says to remove only with the server powered off, replacing a drive is a planned shutdown: the ZFS pool keeps running on its remaining drives until the maintenance window, and our optional monitoring service alerts you when a pool is degraded. The four front NVMe bays accept 7 mm U.2 drives. The chassis is 955 mm deep and sits on L-shelf rails, so it needs a full-depth four-post rack and a two-person lift.

Proxmox VE 9 is the host operating system, with a one-year Proxmox VE Basic subscription. Windows Server is licensed on all 32 physical cores: Standard edition covers two Windows Server virtual machines per full licensing, while Datacenter edition covers any number of virtual machines on the licensed server, so we quote both against your VM count, with CALs. SQL Server 2025 Standard uses up to 32 cores and a 256 GB buffer pool per instance; larger databases need Enterprise edition. Windows Server 2022 with Hyper-V on bare metal (on the board maker's OS list for this processor) and Ubuntu Server LTS are available on request.

Compared with Sentinel Professional, Advanced doubles the cores (32 vs 16), triples the memory (384GB vs 128GB), uses all twelve memory channels instead of eight, doubles the usable flash, moves from 10GBASE-T to 25GbE SFP28 and steps up to 1000W redundant supplies. Professional keeps its data drives in front hot-swap bays; Advanced trades that for internal 3.5-inch capacity. For failover between servers, choose Sentinel Enterprise, a three-node high-availability cluster built from the same chassis and processor.

Every server has its BIOS and BMC firmware updated and completes a 72-hour burn-in with a written report covering all twelve memory channels and a power-supply failover test. It ships with Proxmox VE, ZFS and the 25GbE links configured, the BMC on a management network and an as-built document that includes the drive-replacement procedure, followed by a one-hour remote handover. Options include 768GB and 192GB memory configurations and EPYC 9005 processors (by quote), four more SSDs (7.68TB usable), the hard-drive tier, a dual-port 10GBASE-T card, SFP28 cables or optics matched to your switch, a 1500VA rack UPS, on-site installation, backup configuration, monitoring and multi-server consolidation projects. Memory is sourced and validated per order. 1U fans are loud, so plan for a rack room; one host is not high availability; and backups belong on separate hardware. Covered by our 3-Year Hardware Warranty and Lifetime Technical Support. Configured and quoted per project; built and tested in Ontario.