So far my current Supermicro board has been flawless but it is getting old now and need to consolidate my 2 other servers at home. I am now looking to dive into VMware and run unraid as a guest and from what i can tell on VMware's site the S5532 series is certified with VMware 5.5. so my main question is do you think this board will be ok with unraid or have any issues passing through the hardware for unraid with this board? I was also looking at the Supermicro MBD-X10SL7-F-O but i don't need that many onboard sata ports and it only has 3 pci-e slots, so since i already have two AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards that will not leave me any room for future expansion for nics etc...

 

here is the link to the board http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813151292&Tpk=N82E16813151292

 

 

Thanks

James

I have several Tyan S5512s they work well for me with ESXi 5.0.  The only problem I had with them was with an AVer Media Duet tuner card which was not recognized by current bios's and Ivy Bridge CPUs.  I had to use the Sandy Bridge only bios and CPUs.  I had the SAME problem on my SuperMicro X9SCM MB as well.  It was where I first found out about the incompatibility.  I had the Sandy Bridge only bios installed on my X9SCM and the only change I made was to upgrade the bios to the IVY Bridge compatible bios - my Duet tuner that was installed was no longer visible for pass through.  When I got a Tyan S5512GM4NR MB with the Ivy Bridge bios it wouldn't recognize the Duet either but the S5512GM2NR I had with the earlier Sandy only bios had no problems.  I even tried the Duet on my Intel DH77EB Ivy Bridge MB with Ivy Bridge CPU and it wouldn't recognize the Duet - it has Windows 7 x64 ultimate installed and no HyperVisor.  Intel put out a bios update which fixed the incompatibility for me.  The fix talked about timings for PCIe 3.0 as causing the problems so could still be a problem on a Haswell based MB if the bios hasn't been updated. Tyan's latest bios for my S5512s hasn't fixed it yet and neither has SuperMicro's latest bios for my X9SCM.  But every other card I've tried with my S5512's and X9SCM has worked in pass through in ESXi.

 

 

So long story short it sounds like an excellent upgrade to me.  Just be beware of PCIe 1.0 cards (what the Duet is) as you could (but most likely won't) have problems with them.  If they still haven't fixed the bios like Intel did anyway. 

BobPhoenix thanks for the info, i don't plan on any multimedia type cards in there only to use it to consolidate and host my unraid, exchange server and domain controller. later down the line I maybe will look at a xmbc shared database server.

 

I just wanted to make sure before dropping about $900 for everything since i have not used tyan boards before.

 

 

thanks

James

BobPhoenix thanks for the info, i don't plan on any multimedia type cards in there only to use it to consolidate and host my unraid, exchange server and domain controller. later down the line I maybe will look at a xmbc shared database server.

 

I just wanted to make sure before dropping about $900 for everything since i have not used tyan boards before.

 

 

thanks

James

I like them (Tyan).  My first Tyan MB was a dual (300mhz or 400mhz) pentium (II or III) MB that would probably still be running if I hadn't upgraded.  I had 3 Pentium 4 478 MBs made by Tyan.  Then I switched to SuperMicro when I couldn't get a MB with the slot arrangement I wanted from Tyan for a core processor.  Stayed with SuperMicro for a while but once again the slot configuration made me look at Tyan again when I saw the S5512s.

I received my board yesterday and installed it and so far it all came up fine and all good so i started a parity check and it is going at the same speed as my old board (35mbs) so from the looks it will be ok, now for vmware .

 

so this weekend i plan to install my BRi10 controller to mirror the ESXi drives for vmware install/datastore then pass my 2 AOC-SASLP-MV8 controllers and motherboard ports to unraid and hopefully all will be fine 

 

thanks

James