Tyan S5512WGM2NR

[Spritzup]

Any thoughts on the Tyan S5512WGM2NR board?  Looks like it could be promising, though I don't know if the build in SAS ports would be useful.

[sacretagent]

should be OK with the 5.0 Beta7

might need to flash the lsi2008 controller

 

see this thread -> http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=12767.msg121130#msg121130

[Spritzup]

So I assume that if I was to follow Raj's build for the 40 TB Beast, I would only need to buy one of the Supermicro cards instead of 2?  If that's the case, I would say that's a pretty good savings...

[Johnm]

As far as i can see....

 

that board "should" do just fine. I'm running a C204 chipset myself with an I3-2100.

 

It looks like it has an Intel 82574L NIC. again fine, the Intel 82579LM You tend to see on some C204's are not yet supported.

 

the question will be re-flashing the LSI Controller.

 

As stated, Full support for that LSI card is in 5.0 Beta7. It should also work in Beta 6a (maybe older also?). I believe drive spin down and temp readings are not working.

 

You will have to upgrade the memtest on the flash drive to support the C204 memory controller. There is a tutorial to do that. it takes 5 seconds to upgrade. (unless beta 7 had that fix already)

[notandor]

I'm thinking about getting this board. I know that this board is very new (and not many, if only few) people might even have it... but still I ask some questions which some experts might be able to answer based on other experiences.

 

Will this board if used in an ESXi configuration, allow passthrough of the complete "LSI 2008 SAS Controller" to a guest VM like unraid? Or in other words, will LSI 2008 SAS controller still seen as 1 controller and not 8 individual ports.

 

Or given the LSI 2008 SAS controller is onboard the motherboard, it will more likely allow individual SAS/SATA port to pass through to different guest VMs?

 

Also, does this type of onboard SAS controller will allow adding one or two expansion cards (using 4 sas port each) like LSI SAS2X36 based expanders etc.

 

And just for kicks, if all the above is true, then this type of board with 2 expanders (e.g. CK23601 with 36 ports with 4 to be use to connect to controller) could theoretically allow 70 ports =6+32+32 (6 on mobo - 4x sata2, 2x sata3; 36-4=32 ports on each expanders)... providing all sort of virutal boxes and OSs just run from 1 single box!!! with all pci-e still unused to pass through to virtual OSes.

 

 

[jimwhite]

I purchased one of these for a new build I'm in the middle of now.  It's going to be an ESXi 4.1 box with a total of 16 drives ( maybe 18?).  Six on the Intel Southbridge, 8 on the onboard LSI 2008, and 2 or 4 on the E-Bay LSI plug in card I'm awaiting delivery on.  My case, a Thermaltake Armour, has 4 3-in-2 Hot Swap cages and one 4-in-3, all from Kingwin.  The case also has an internal mount for 2 more drives which I may or may not use.  The intention is to use 2 drives in raid-0 on the plug-in card as data store for the ESXi layer.  Maybe these will go in the internal mount, allowing use of all 16 front slots for unraid.  Still gelling that config in my mind.  Other specs are few... a Corsair 750 watt supply, 16 Samsung 2tb 204 drives for unraid, and 2 Seagate 7200 rpm 1tb drives for the raid0 datastore, 16 gb of ecc ddr3, Xeon E3-1230  ...

 

I've been playing with the board quite a bit at the esxi level, learning how to migrate VM's back and forth between host and client, and such.  The board runs great and I'm absolutely thrilled with the ip based KVM functionality... being able to totally power-down the server and the turn it back on from my desktop is the bees-knees...