Building my first hypervisor...have two motherboards and can't choose

T

techtips

Gawd
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Jan 3, 2011
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Hey everyone, I have a few i5 series desktops in my home that I acquired from a local college. I was selling off a bunch of them but turned one into a gaming pc a few months ago and now I want to convert it into a proxmox/hypervisor node.

The units I have are fairly current and have either of the following motherboards installed:


The asus board is a socket 1156 and the Intel board is 1155. The Intel board seem's like it's a workstation/business class board with limited but correct ports...while the Asus board seems to be a gamer board??

I ordered a i7 870 for the Asus board, put in 32gb onto it and put in my quad NIC and loaded proxmox. Everything so far seem's to be fine but I'm wondering if the Intel board would be more practical to act as a hypervisor/server? I could pickup a xeon E3-1245 and use that with the intel board and my memory would be compatible also.

I'm just curious if there is something that might stand out between the two boards that would lead one to be better for my server/hypervisor over the other?

I don't want to order newer components...I have what I have and it should suffice for a newb and his VM's for a bit.


Thanks!
 
Major question: will you be using passthrough?

If so, ASUS motherboards are notorious for not supporting VT-d in the BIOS even if the CPU supports it.

If you are going to use passthrough go with the Intel board - the Xeon supports VT-d.
 
I have DQ67SW and it works great as a server. also it has simple KVM via intel AMT.I've tested it with ESXi 5.5 and Server 2012 R2/2016. Everything works great including VT-D in ESXi - i've used it for FreeNAS
IMO Better choose than asus as a server.
 
rtangwai said:
Major question: will you be using passthrough?

If so, ASUS motherboards are notorious for not supporting VT-d in the BIOS even if the CPU supports it.

If you are going to use passthrough go with the Intel board - the Xeon supports VT-d.
Click to expand...


I actually haven't through about much about passthrough at this time.

My plans for the hypervisor is:
-Gain experience with proxmox/and possibly xenserver
-VM's to create:
--PFsense possibly
--Game Server
--Pi-Hole ad blocking server/DNS
--Few Windows Server OS's to setup AD/DHCP and such within the network

I don't plan on playing games within a VM so i don't think that the passthrough is important to me, unless you can suggest something else other then gaming that would benefit from it.




sybreeder said:
I have DQ67SW and it works great as a server. also it has simple KVM via intel AMT.I've tested it with ESXi 5.5 and Server 2012 R2/2016. Everything works great including VT-D in ESXi - i've used it for FreeNAS
IMO Better choose than asus as a server.
Click to expand...


Thank you for the reply, it seem's like a great board and I'm glad I didn't sell this one :)
 
I use passthrough on my ESXi 6 hypervisor for my M1015 controller so it can be seen by FreeNAS.

It's also useful for applications that use security dongles.

If you are making a TV server some capture hardware require passthrough (although my USB Hauppauge HD-PVR2 actually works better without passthrough).
 
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