Much later and much research completed....

 

The P9X79 WS is looking like the board for me. I would prefer a Supermicro but they are as rare as hens teeth over here, 2-3 weeks back order min, whereas the Asus can be purchased at a competitive price since several people have them.

 

The P9X79 WS does indeed support ECC RAM according to some similar forum posts it is just that the i7 series CPUs wont use the ECC feature so there would be no benefit.

 

However the E5-2620 is out (although hard to actually find to buy). The E5 series has some serious ESX optimizations to its worth the premium.

 

So the big decision is RAM. The QVL is limiting but I can get matched sticks at an aggressive price from a memory specialist.

 

The options are:

 

8x4GB Non ECC = 124.40

4x8GB Non ECC = 196.00

8x4GB ECC = 188.00

4x8GB ECC = 460.00

 

Cannot make up my mind. I dont want to pay a premium if in a years time i could get 8x8GB ECC at a fraction of the cost and demand has increased

 

Anyone any thoughts

I was in a similar dilemma to you - I ended up importing a Supermicro board from superbiiz (still cheaper than any local option here in Australia and really wanted IPMI and ECC RAM).  Will be using a E3-1230 to start with, may upgrade to an E5 down the track when they get a little cheaper.

 

For me, the RAM was a no brainer, but I only had 4 slots to deal with!.  4x4Gb ECC for $120, and if and when the price of 8Gb sticks drops (which I'm sure it will eventually) I'll swap them out.  I can get by on 16Gb until then.

 

Your needs may differ of course!

Just to close my own thread down.

 

After countless hours of reading I took the decision that i could not risk brand new hardware. The information provided by the vmware community was just to sparse to make certain the kit I purchased would work exactly as i needed.

 

So I purchased two Fujitsu TX100 S3 Xeon E3-1220 with 16GB of RAM each. These are designed for small office and are quiet only having a 250W PSU. VT-d is supported and there is enough PCI-e over two of them to suit my needs.

 

They are not on the vmware supported hardware list but by chance i happened upon someone in an IRC channel who had two and after much Q&A the only part that doesn't work with ESX is RAID.

 

Interestingly enough after the Fujitsu rebate i saved over $500 going this route which i will put towards 8GB memory omdules once they come down to a reasonable price point (the servers can support 32GB each just the cost this now are prohibitive with the RAM costing more than the whole 8GB server).

 

Hope this helps someone although likely in  few onths time enough info will be out there for soeone to make a similar decision based on E5.