I'm using the very same board with great success. Specifically, I'm running with an E3-1230 Xeon and 16gb of ECC ddr3-1333 ram. I'm running unRaid 5.0b9 on top of ESXi 4.1u1, but if I select the unRaid usb-stick as boot device it will boot right into unRaid with nary a twitch! I have two additional plug-in controllers, one to add two more disks to fill-out my front panel of 16 drives (2TB Samsungs), the other is a raid controller for the ESXi DataStor. The on-board "Intel" controller, the on-board LSI controller and the 2-drive fill-out controller get passed through by ESXi to unRaid which makes the configuration agnostic as to whether it boots ESXi or unRaid. Great for peace of mind. I have several other VM's running (Linux and Windows) which take care of all my daemon type apps such as torrents, newsgroups, media serving, etc. Highly recommended.