ESXi5 and Socket 2011 which MB?

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x-cimo

Limp Gawd
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Mar 26, 2012
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I am looking at building an ESXi5 and with Core i7 3820 or Core i7 3930K, I Must have VT-d, and it seem that all 3820 have it, but only newer 3930K have it (can anyone confirm?)

I will be running a few vm, and a 10 TB ZFS data store on it.

I am wondering if which board I should pick for it, I perfer ASUS as I've been using them for many years. Anyone have some result with the X79 chipset and ESXi ? Which one would be good without having to get the top of the line one($$$).

I am planning at using some PCIe intel nic, but working onboard nic would be a benifit.

My reason for going with socket 2011 instead of the upcomming ivy bridge is the amount of ram supported, 32Gb is my target but being able to get up to 64 gb later is a real benifit.

I also looked at upcomming Xeon, but the board are really expansive so is 32gb ECC memory, and CPU is about 50$ more, I am not sure the exta 500$ to go xeon would be worth it for me.

Any advise?

Thanks!
 
As far as Asus is concerned, the x79 Pro and x79 RoG boards have working vt-d, and presumably the same bios update was applied to their entire x79 line to add vt-d support, so I'd guess that you're good if you go the Asus route.

edit: just realized this was a closely related post from your other thread, but hopefully you got the answer you were looking for.
 
Does the x79 non pro (standard) support vt-d ?

Seem like very little advantage to go pro/deluxe/ws for me.
 
I haven't personally verified it, but I believe it did receive the same bios update enabling vt-d that the pro board did, so I'd think so. You might be able to find someone else with that particular board that could verify.
 
I've look at the Bios update and it will support it.

Another question for you, did you try to passthrough (VT-d) a onboard SATA port to a guest?

I will need to pass through a Intel SSD drive connected to any of the onboard sata port to a guest, and I wonder if it will work.

And while I have you here, does ESXi5 detect any of the onboard NIC of that board?
 
VT-d won't pass through individual onboard sata ports. You can try and pass through the entire controller, although I think that usually introduces other issues, or along those same lines you can pass through a add-on pci-e controller. Alternatively, you can use RDM (raw device mapping) to accomplish what you're talking about - it doesn't assign the port statically to a vm, but rather the drive. This takes a little bit of work, but there's a fair amount of info out there on doing it, so you could definitely figure it out without too much trouble. If there's another way to do this, I'm not aware of it, but I'm hardly an expert (I know only what I've experimented with). You could also just assign the ssd as a datastore for esxi and then put the vm on there - of course, you lose trim support then, so it depends on the GC of your particular ssd and what you exactly want to do.

As to the onboard NIC's, I know some of the higher asus boards have 2 different intel controllers - one's natively supported, the other is not in the basic install. The Asus pro board has only the intel controller that isn't natively supported, and I'm not sure what nic's the other boards use. However, there's a pretty easy fix to getting the non-native intel nic to work, and that can be found on these forums - http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1607992
It seems a little much at first glance, but I probably got it done in under 15m without having much of an idea what I was doing.
 
Thanks! I am not sure what I was thinking when I wrote this... my question should have been:

Does ESXi5 support some of the on-board SATA so I can use them as a local datastore?
 
With that amount of RAM and storage you want ECC. Don't be cheap.
 
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