Good lord, high price but look at these specs for an mATX board:

 

http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=EPC612D4U-2T8R#Specifications

 

Sibling with no 10gbps:

 

http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=EPC612D4U-8R#Specifications

 

Total of 16 drives from one mobo, can fit a nice GFX card here for your vitualisation needs... Throw in an E5-2603v3 in there and you're golden.

 

Thoughts, for the wealthy unRAIDer?

 

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asrock-epc612d4u-2t8r-intel-c612-s2011-3-ddr4-pcie-30-(x16)-sata-iii-sas-12gbps-d-sub-(vga)-uatx-mot

Just put in an order for this board. 

 

I originally ordered the supermicro MBD-X10SRI-F (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182928)

But after the 2nd MB arriving at my house with a fully bent back serial port, I got tired of trying to "work with" supermicro on their newer design of the flimsy VGA and serial ports.

 

So, this will be my replacement for that, should arrive on tues/wed of this coming week. I chose the 1Gb NIC card model.... Although I did sit there for a while and kept hopping back and forth. But in my case, having this at home, and all my home networking equipment is based around 1Gb (with no clear plan to upgrade anytime soon) just went with the cheaper model.

 

Will be running this with 32GB (4 x 8GB) crucial DDR4 ECC and an Xeon E5-2620 V3

 

This will be a full replacement for my system I had been running for a while now, I want to beef up everything 

Currently I have a C2D 8400 on an older Supermicro board with on-board (6x ) SATA ports and 2 x 2 GB of DDR2. Works fine as just a file server, but I want to explore more into the ESXi / Unraid Docker features and need more juice.

 

HDD's will all be upgraded from 2 TB drives to 4 TB drives. Thinking I am going to build a 20TB array with a 500GB raptor cache. Will use the onboard (SB controller) SATA ports for ESXi itself, or any auxiliary system. Likely the onboard LSI controller I will pass through to unRAID. Then if needed I have a couple LSI 9211-8i's and 4i's at home I could use to expand if needed.

 

Very much looking forward to running full headless with IPMI, and just having a newer feature set.

Excellent, let us know how this board works. I would suggest going for SSDs as cache, for a system at this level, why not!

SSD(s)? for cache. I get currently a fully saturated write to my Raptor with my gigabit interfaces reaching %98 at a sustained 115 MBps. I am not sure that replacing the raptor (have no other use for it) with one of the SSD(s) (ha, which I do have laying around) I have laying around.  - please knock some sense into me if I can get something else out of it over gigabit.

 

But with that aside, I will for sure let you know how it goes.

 

As a side note, is there any reason why most users here use ESXi 5.5 vs 6.0? I notice that there are heavy complaints on the web interface for 6.0 (as the client has been thinned out) vs 5.5 where most users use the client. Is there more I need to look into it, or is that the main complaints.

 

With plugging into only one host, I am not convinced the web interface would become bogged down. (maybe in a data-center, sure)

For me the SSD helps when running VMs, extracting large files, generally just speeds up IO so much it doesn't make sense not to have one.

 

I use the client and was not aware that 6.0 had a web interface, which would be awesome. I am trying to move to barebones unRAID 6.0 myself so i don't see the point of using ESXi at all... considering how much easier it is to do device passthrough in unRAID.

I am trying to move to barebones unRAID 6.0 myself so i don't see the point of using ESXi at all... considering how much easier it is to do device passthrough in unRAID.

 

Oooh :-) Please, do tell more. 

 

I am reading the virtualization overview now.

 

Come to jesus meeting over here, I may be doing this out of order. With unraid 6, I may be better off eliminating ESXi all together as an option and go bare metal, like most other users in here. Using an older release of unraid, yeah, esxi would likely be the way to go. But with 6.0.1 + why add an unnecessary layer.