Help with a 20-drive server upgrade

[smeehrrr]

I have a couple of 20-drive Norco-case servers in my rack, one of which is super limited in spec and the other of which is beefier and driving a bunch of VMs in addition to serving files.  I've recently noticed that the VM server is overloaded and it's causing media streaming from it to glitch, so I'd like to upgrade the lesser server to something more capable and offload some of the VMs from one machine to the other.  I'd like to salvage some of the hardware in the process, and that's where I'm getting confused.

 

The server to be upgraded is currently running an ASUS P5BV-M motherboard and has two Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 SAS cards in it on PCI-Ex8 slots.  I'd like to dump that motherboard and replace it with something that can hold a virtualization capable processor and 64GB of RAM, but for the life of me I cannot figure out which motherboard is going to have the correct combination of PCI-E slots to let those cards run at full efficiency.  Anyone have a mobo recommendation that won't break the bank?

[JonathanM]

51 minutes ago, smeehrrr said:

two Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 SAS

Those cards are known to be problematic with later versions of linux, with unraid specifically anything 6.X and ongoing some people have issues with marvell controller based cards randomly dropping drives.

 

You would be much better off sourcing LSI controller based cards along with the motherboard upgrade.

[smeehrrr]

I've been running them since 2014 with no problems, on up to date versions of Unraid.  What kinds of issues are people seeing?  What are the models of the recommended LSI cards?

[JorgeB]

Main issues with the SAS2LP are dropped disks and in some cases gives always 5 sync errors on a parity check after rebooting (corrupting data), but they do still work for some, though can start giving problems at any time, usually after an Unraid release update.

 

As for LSI, any with a SAS2008/2308/3008/3408 chipset in IT mode, e.g., 9201-8i, 9211-8i, 9207-8i, 9300-8i, 9400-8i, etc and clones, like the Dell H200/H310 and IBM M1015, these latter ones need to be crossflashed.