Okay, I need some assistance. I am not a noob and quite experienced with servers, virtualization, and unRaid. I just lack time. I have tried committing myself to doing research to find a motherboard to build a system off of and just keep running into roadblocks where either I find products in a dizzying amount of configurations without reviews, or I find products with reviews but they don't seem to have the features I am looking for. Ideal motherboard:
1. Dual 2011R3 (to support the next gen procs
2. 8 memory slots is fine
3. Quad onboard NICs preferred, but have no problem adding more
4. I would like to use Intel Xeon E5-2620 v3 or Intel Xeon E5-2630 v3
I am looking to rebuild my unRaid 5 server with unRaid 6 and utilize Xen. Something along the lines of:
dom0 - unRaid, Xen
domU1 - Sickbeard, CouchPotato, Transmission
domU2 - MediaBrowser3
domU3 - Win7 HTPC - passthrough Video card for light emulation gaming
domU4 - Win8.1 VM for the kids - they are little and will do light web browsing and maybe flash-based gaming
domU5 - Win8.1 Gaming PC - high-end vid card passthrough - I like games and eye candy
I would like to add more as I play around with building VMs like domain controllers and such for MCSE re-cert prep...hence the additional horsepower. Am I overthinking this? Is a dual socket setup overkill? I don't mind going single socket (maybe an 8 core with hyperthreading), if I can ensure I get everything VM'd with decent video recoding potential for streaming video on the HTPC or Rokus around the house.