The Dell/VMware VEP1445 and in general the VEP1400-series are a nice set of low power machines driven by a Denverton CPU. They usually come in two flavors, either the Edge 600 series or VEP1400 series. Besides the outside look (white case or black case), they are fairly similar.
They all come with 2 SFP+ ports (limited to SFP on the low power VEP1405 / Edge 610) and 6 1G Ethernet ports, all supporting VirtIO, making them nice edge boxes for virtualization, although only low power applications are recommended due to the type of CPU.
| Model | Edge 610 / VEP1400 | Edge 620 / VEP1425 | Edge 640 / VEP1445 | Edge 680 / VEP1485 |
| CPU | C3558 | C3758 | C3958 | |
| Cores | 2 | 4 | 8 | 16 |
| Memory | 8GB (soldered) | 8GB (soldered) | 16GB (soldered) | 32GB (16GB soldered, 16GB so-dimm) |
| Network | 2x SFP 1Gb / 6x 1Gb | 2x SFP+ 10Gb / 6x 1Gb | 2x SFP+ 10Gb / 6x 1Gb | 2x SFP+ 10Gb / 6x 1Gb |
The memory can be upgraded through a SO-Dimm slot, supporting up to 32GB sticks (must be DDR4 ECC UDIMM 2400MT). The CPU should support Flex memory, which means the fraction of the memory stick that equals the soldered memory should work as dual-channel, while the leftovers will work in single channel (to be tested).
These boxes also support an m.2 sata port for the hard disk, and a mini-pcie slot for a wifi/bluetooth card, standard in some configurations. The mini pcie slot can support an nvme drive, but this causes some complains about the missing wifi card with some bios revisions, requiring some nvram tinkering to silence it. The nvme drive would be limited to one lane of pcie, so no need to install a beefy disk there.
These devices also have an eMMC device that can be used to either install the base system (not recommended) or to install Dell's tools suite called DiagOS (a flavor of debian that contains some utilities).
Installation of DiagOS
The requirements are simple, one need a mini-usb cable and a usb stick. As these devices do not have a display output, it must be accessed via a serial console (hidden port) that uses a Silicon Labs CP2102 UART controller. Most of the recent kernels have the cp210x driver available, otherwise it must be downloaded / built from the Silicon Labs website.
The USB port is located by the SFP cages under a small panel held in place by a #0 Phillips screw.
Once the screw was removed, the port is revealed. An interesting fact is that the port does not require the VEP1445 to be powered to be recognized, which allows early access to the boot screen.
The console can be accessed via any terminal, using 115200 baud, 8 bit with no parity.
DiagOS deb download URL: https://dl.dell.com/FOLDER11320873M/1/dn-diags-VEP1400-Diag%20Tools-3.43.4.81-26-2022-12-08.zip
DisgOS ISO URL: https://dl.dell.com/FOLDER11320770M/1/diagos-recovery-x86_64-dellemc_vep1400_c3538-r0.3.43.3.81-27.zip
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