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I just wanted to post my experiences with trying to setup a cost effective (read: cheap) ESXi server. There isn't a whole lot of information out there and what you can find is in bits and pieces but here is what I've discovered. Some of this you may already know and some which you may not.
Supermicro boards just don't work with ES CPUs past their 1.0 revision bios. I asked them to help me with supporting the CPUs on a X8DTL but they cannot.
Asus boards, specifically the Z8 series DO work with ES CPUs but you may have issues getting into CPU specific sections in the bios. I've been using Asus server boards for a while now and they have been extremely reliable so I will happily recommend them.
If you still decide to save the $50-75 bucks per CPU and get a ES keep in mind you will NOT be able to run VMware ESX/ESXi past version 4.0. If you try you will always get the purple screen of death even if you disable the ipmi_si_drv from loading. While 4.0 might not be limiting to some it will definitely hinder you in the future.
In my quest to save money to build a cheap ESXi server I ended up spending more money, about $150 between paying for returns and switching to non ES Xeons. I didn't even include the cost of my time and energy spent trying to get this all to work. In short, it's just not worth it so pony up for retail/oem Xeons.
In my personal scenario I bought the SM X8DTL-iF which by all accounts is a fantastic board with 4x PCIe and 2 PCI and built in IPKVM but the board exhibited strange problems which I attributed it being an open box from Newegg. To replace that I bought the Asus Z8NA-D6C. While it is missing a great number of features there's only 1 ATX 8 pin requirement compared to 2 on SM. But having an extra PCIe slot would have been welcome for future expansion as I replace my server hardware every 6-7 years.
So now I have 2 E5507s on order with 32GB (4x8) DDR3 Registered ram for my next ESXi server for a total cost of about $756 or about $900 including my screwups. Lesson learned!
Supermicro boards just don't work with ES CPUs past their 1.0 revision bios. I asked them to help me with supporting the CPUs on a X8DTL but they cannot.
Asus boards, specifically the Z8 series DO work with ES CPUs but you may have issues getting into CPU specific sections in the bios. I've been using Asus server boards for a while now and they have been extremely reliable so I will happily recommend them.
If you still decide to save the $50-75 bucks per CPU and get a ES keep in mind you will NOT be able to run VMware ESX/ESXi past version 4.0. If you try you will always get the purple screen of death even if you disable the ipmi_si_drv from loading. While 4.0 might not be limiting to some it will definitely hinder you in the future.
In my quest to save money to build a cheap ESXi server I ended up spending more money, about $150 between paying for returns and switching to non ES Xeons. I didn't even include the cost of my time and energy spent trying to get this all to work. In short, it's just not worth it so pony up for retail/oem Xeons.
In my personal scenario I bought the SM X8DTL-iF which by all accounts is a fantastic board with 4x PCIe and 2 PCI and built in IPKVM but the board exhibited strange problems which I attributed it being an open box from Newegg. To replace that I bought the Asus Z8NA-D6C. While it is missing a great number of features there's only 1 ATX 8 pin requirement compared to 2 on SM. But having an extra PCIe slot would have been welcome for future expansion as I replace my server hardware every 6-7 years.
So now I have 2 E5507s on order with 32GB (4x8) DDR3 Registered ram for my next ESXi server for a total cost of about $756 or about $900 including my screwups. Lesson learned!
