Actually, the 1230v2 is a good choice as well.

 

In any event, I'm sure you'll want to use an Ivy Bridge unit => higher memory bandwidth, lower power utilization, and more "horsepower" ... with all the same virtualization options.

 

As a comparison (based on today's pricing) ...

 

The E3-1230 costs $240, and scores 8163 on PassMark.    The E3-1230v2 is CHEAPER ($235), and scores 8975.    The E3-1240v2 costs $275, and scores 9453.    So between the 1230v2 and 1240v2 the cost goes up 17% but the performance only goes up 5%.    I'd probably opt for the 1240v2 "just because" ... but the math tends to support the 1230v2 as the best price/performance choice 

 

I went with the 1230v2 because I agree, that is the price to performance sweet spot of the E3-1200v2 series.

I would suggest the X9scm-iif and the 1240v2 for the second ESXi build.  I just built one for a customer using those pieces and 32GB of RAM.  it worked a treat.

 

 

Thanks for the heads up. I will do this with build #2 next month!

A bit of curiosity about what they may have changed between X9SCM-F and X9SCM-iiF led me to do a very detailed comparison on the SuperMicro site between the two boards.

 

The ONLY difference between the two boards seems to be the LAN adapters.  Both have dual Gb NICs.  The -F implements them with an Intel 82579LM and an Intel 82574L;  the -iiF has dual 82574L's

 

Other than that, the specs are identical -- even have the same caveats and footnotes.    The current BIOS revs are different -- the -iiF uses v2.0a,  the -F is at v2.0b

 

The manuals are slightly different.    The manual for the -iiF is Rev 1.0, data 24 April 2012;  the manual for the -F is Rev 1.2, dated 19 September 2012.

 

Bottom line:  I have NO idea what functional differences anyone might note between these two boards 

(I suspect the answer is NONE)

 

 

A bit of curiosity about what they may have changed between X9SCM-F and X9SCM-iiF led me to do a very detailed comparison on the SuperMicro site between the two boards.

 

The ONLY difference between the two boards seems to be the LAN adapters.  Both have dual Gb NICs.  The -F implements them with an Intel 82579LM and an Intel 82574L;  the -iiF has dual 82574L's

 

Other than that, the specs are identical -- even have the same caveats and footnotes.    The current BIOS revs are different -- the -iiF uses v2.0a,  the -F is at v2.0b

 

The manuals are slightly different.    The manual for the -iiF is Rev 1.0, data 24 April 2012;  the manual for the -F is Rev 1.2, dated 19 September 2012.

 

Bottom line:  I have NO idea what functional differences anyone might note between these two boards 

(I suspect the answer is NONE)

 

The 82579LM does not work in ESXi without a hacked driver that has to be manually installed. With the iiF both NICs will work out of the box in ESXi.

The 82579LM does not work in ESXi without a hacked driver that has to be manually installed. With the iiF both NICs will work out of the box in ESXi.

 

Thanks.  While that's obviously only an issue if you want to use both NICs, it's nice to know the functional difference => and it's certainly a good reason to go with the -iiF

 

I've been reading a good bit about ESXi, and if I'm understanding this correctly, you can't use the local motherboard SATA ports to store the VMs on ==> is this right? !!

 

Can the local ports be "passed through" to a VM (e.g. an UnRAID machine)?

 

... or does all local storage have to be provided through ESXi compatible RAID cards ??

 

No, that's wrong - local SATA ports are fine to use for datastores, I have my primary datastore running off a SATA 3 SSD attached to a SATA 3 port on my motherboard.

 

You can't typically pass through SATA controllers to a VM as that then leaves you with nowhere to host your datastores, unless you want them off box.  Even if you created a ZFS datastore on something like NAS4Free, you'd still have to store the virtual disk for that VM in another local datastore.

 

You could always set up an iSCSI/NFS datastore on another box, but that kinda defeats the purpose of an all-in-one power-saving type setup imho.

 

Also, typically the SATA controllers aren't the only thing that is part of that section of the chipset, so when you pass the whole controller through, it breaks things like USB.  That's why you see most people RDM drives from onboard SATA through to an unRAID VM.

Thanks.  Clearly this can get a bit complex, but I'll wait until this fall when I build the server to ask any further questions.    The basic server is simple -- SuperMicro, Xeon, 32GB, case, PSU.    Deciding on a local data store for the VMs, and just how to connect a bunch of drives for passthrough to an UnRAID VM may be an interesting learning experience.

 

I've got UNRAID running in a Hyper-V on Win8 after running the make-bootable.bat file on a virtual hard drive (required small tweak). Booted up fine when the VM had only the unraid vhdx file - but as mentioned previously, the Hyper-V network switch wasn't detected.

 

Was experimenting with running a pre-clear on a new 4 TB drive with the physical drive mounted in the VM. The OS didn't pick up the drive as far as I can tell. Working on my noobness.

 

ETA: Noted that this limits you to the free-version of UNRAID but for my pre-clear purpose, it's fine.