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First impression was single onboard VGA output and DE-9 serial port...typical enterprise.

Second impression was damn does that first socket look like a peripheral hog.

EDIT: Removed remark that erroneously referenced this comment[1] as a 2U chassis being applicable to the motherboard in question.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/comments/15783/the-supermicro-h11d...

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That’s a completely different chassis, as seen by the “Integrated Board: Super H12DST-B” photo. The review is of the H11DSi, which is designed for (big) tower cases.

Thanks for pointing out that missed detail on my part.

The VGA output would be part of the IPMI solution for remote management, serial would be for out of band management too. Both are useful if you don't want to drive to the datacenter

For a very long time I joked that no self-respecting server had a VGA, keyboard or mouse ports. Serious metal should have serial ports for the operator console.

That didn't age too well...

Well technically you can often ssh to the BMC and connect to the OS through an emulated serial link...

Serial port is awesome to me just because you can copy/paste...

It gets better thanks to UEFI, since it provides serial-safe approach for system management.

IBM PC compatible systems had no serial console and it shows in abominations like some Intel RAID controllers that required mouse to get through their graphical UIs. Even if you used one of the special "UI-over-serial" cards that were used on some PC servers, lack of support meant that it was perfectly normal for some option from to expect bitmapped graphics and want to use it :(

With UEFI providing a basic UI framework that covers all that firmware needs (and which still allows for fancy looking UI if you connect to framebuffer) serial console is back in use :)

majority of BMC solutions default to VGA connection, and any good one will have a serial port - either DE-9 or RJ style.

It's much, much easier to standardize on VGA-based iKVMs than otherwise, and this drives the "let's use VGA" movement.

(Only real difference would be switching to DisplayPort, and this doesn't bring any benefits either...)

Completely aware of the enterprise implication, but it's somewhat of a disappoint that with all that peripheral support, they could have at least dropped a courtesy single link DVI-I interface instead. It just smells like a decision driven to explicitly avoid paying out licensing royalties.

And pray tell, what would drive the digital part of the DVI? The video source has only analog VGA output available, so you can technically use a DVI-A connector, but pretty much nothing used them.

And while DVI/HDMI signaling is pretty much VGA-but-analog, recovering digital stream out of analog VGA signal would make no sense.

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