October 14, 201213 yr Hmm...I need to dig a bit deeper....need 3+ pcs. of PCIe x8 slots plus 2+ pcs. of PCIe x1 on the mobo at minimum...with passthrough/IOMMU working of course. Thinking out loud, maybe a SM Dual Operteron 4000 series board is a good start (starting with 1 CPU, if all slots will work). The H8DCL-iF is in the same price-range as the X9SRL-F, but it is already dual CPU I can save approx 230EUR comparing E5-2620 and AMD-4226 or even 4234.(still saving EUR100 when getting two AMD CPUs, compared to one E5). Both boards will take the same R-ECC Ram and the board will work, starting with one CPU. ...need to check my PSU since the board requires SSi EPS compliance with dual +12V connectors applied.
October 14, 201213 yr Author The extreme4 meets those minimums. I'm loving it so far. I think my brother is going to build a new computer, so he's getting the MSI I couldn't get IOMMU to work on. That's better than returning it I think. Brandon
October 14, 201213 yr Hmm, sorry for not being specific enough. I need 3 slots with x8 lanes / speed, not only with >x8 slot size. The 970 Extreme4 has 2 slots at x8, one slot at x4 plus 2 slots at x1 ...also it comes with a Realtek NIC ...so in this case I will need an extra slot for a decent dual Intel NIC adapter.
October 15, 201213 yr Well, I simply prefer real server parts over desktop parts....love IPMI. My plans are to move my current ESXi build (x8SIL-F with L3426) to more capable hardware (old board will become desktop) ..and ultimately move to KVM/Proxmox-VE...get rid of windoze once and for all...web based management only. I need - 1 x8 with expander for M1015 and ZFS (Solaris) NAS - dito for backup (maybe unRAID) - dito for experimental NAS - 1 x1 for additional NICs (for pfsense or similar VM) - 1 x1 for DVB Tuner / PVR - besides that , running several desktop VMs for family - might experiment with GPU passthrough (have a x1 ATI 6450 with 2GB ram for that) for virtualizing HTPC
October 15, 201213 yr Author Nice, man. I would love to do IPMI, and may later down the road. Sounds like a fun machine. Keep in mind if you do an HTPC with hardware passthrough of a video card, you will lose the IPMI. As soon as you plug a video card into a Supermicro motherboard with IPMI, its disabled. Pisses me off as I wanted to do an all in one, but I ended up getting a Vostro 230 for free from work, so that's now my HTPC. I've considered doing pfsense or Unraid in ESXi, but my current cabling setup makes it very impractical (my server isn't near my modem/router). Brandon
October 15, 201213 yr Author Also, just as a side note, I was able to pick up a refurbished Supermicro CSE-M35 today for $50. Pretty stoked about that one! Now I have to choose which 5 HDDs to put in it until I get another one... hmmm... Brandon
October 15, 201213 yr Keep in mind if you do an HTPC with hardware passthrough of a video card, you will lose the IPMI. As soon as you plug a video card into a Supermicro motherboard with IPMI, its disabled. ...nope...you are losing KVM-over-IP, but IPMI control will still work...not a big problem as there is not much to see on the ESXi home screen, is it? ;-)
November 6, 201213 yr Author Well, I stand corrected. FlexRAID was just kind of awkward. I'm sure it would do what I want it to, but I don't feel like paying for it, it was a bit clumsy (could have just been me... I was fairly busy while trying to set it up over the two week trial), and Unraid just feels more solid to me. I only have one parity drive (3TB Barracuda) and two data drives, so I might as well just use Unraid. Tonight I'm going to begin my adventure in installing Unraid in ESXi. Wish me luck! This could be frustrating. Brandon
November 6, 201213 yr Author Ok, sweet... got Unraid installed on ESXi. It was really fairly straightforward using Johnm's guide. I'm now waiting on the data that's currently on my 2TB data drive to copy over to a spare drive so I can take my M1015 away from my Server 2008R2 VM and give it to Unraid to start putting my array together. Brandon
November 6, 201213 yr Author I added a note about doing Unraid on ESXi on AMD hardware. Works just fine with the right hardware. Brandon
November 12, 201213 yr Author Server is up and running... its sweet! I'm loving it. I have two shares setup, one for each HDD (for now). One is my 1TB Black drive that I use for general storage and the other is a 2TB WD Green drive I use for media. I've streamed a couple of movies, both SD and HD, through Plex (which the server side is running on a different VM on the same host) and it has worked without a hitch. Fantastic! Now to put the rest of my media on the server... I've been ripping DVDs and Blu Rays while I'm at work. Haha! I'm glad I gave Unraid a shot. I'm really liking it. Can't wait to buy a license and add more drives, even if they're just for parity protection or for more media storage. One thing I will note, though, is that the file transfer speeds before parity has been calculated are horrible, but are for some reason much faster after parity has been calculated. I was getting about 26MB/s before, and about 50MB/s after from the same drive in the same machine to the same drive in Unraid. Strange, but that's better than the other way around, even though it would make more sense. Brandon
November 12, 201213 yr Author Also, forgot to mention, during all parity checks, during file transfers, etc., my drives never went past about 28 degrees. Not too bad! Granted they are in front of 120mm Yate Loons in an Antec Three Hundred, but still... I was happy they stayed cool. Up next, SuperMicro CSE M35. Brandon
November 12, 201213 yr Really cool to see its worked out. My hardware won't support it but I do plan on expanding with esxi
November 13, 201213 yr Author I'm happy to finally be at this point. I've been dreaming about it for a while. I highly recommend ESXi. Great stuff! Brandon
November 13, 201213 yr I'm happy to finally be at this point. I've been dreaming about it for a while. I highly recommend ESXi. Great stuff! Brandon Orange I am also doing a build with the as rock board but my Onboard nic keeps dropping. Did you get it working or have you gone with a network card?
November 13, 201213 yr Author That's strange. I've not had any issues with my onboard, although I am using a dual-port Broadcom card, too. Are you having issues in ESXi or vanilla Unraid? Brandon
November 13, 201213 yr In esxi. Haven't been able to connect long enough to install unraid. Can connect to server for a couple of minutes and then network dies. You using the inboard to connect to esxi?
November 13, 201213 yr Author Nope... I'm not using it at all, actually. The cable I have connected to it wasn't well made (by yours truly ) and will only connect at 100MB instead of 1000MB, so I've just not used it until I can get a new cable. I did verify it was the cable, though. Brandon
November 13, 201213 yr Strange then. Any chance you could try connecting to server using onboard NIC. I have a new Intel NIC arriving today which I will be trying so hopefully that solves problem. I had a windows 7 installation running on the hardware for stress testing the build and had no issues with the network card so definately ESXI being the problem. Tried all versions of 5 as well.
November 13, 201213 yr Author I was actually using the integrated NIC fine before I took it off of my vswitch. I took it off because it was being used for data transfer instead of the two gig connections I had setup and I was too lazy to see if I could prioritize. I may take a new cable home from work today and change that one out so it'll be gig again. Brandon
November 13, 201213 yr OK Installed the Intel NIC and now everything seems to be working. No more network dropping. About to install Windows 7 and see if I pass the onboard NIC to it whether it drops.
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