Motherboard for ESXi server??

[Merlinen]

Hi.

I am building my new server atm and i need some advice on what motherboard to pick.
Dunno if i am gona go with a SP or a DP board, DP boards is bit expensive and the server have already cost to much and i think i only need 1 CPU

These are some of the boards that i have looked at.

SuperMicro X8STE ~300€
Intel S5520HC ~430€
Asus Z8NR-D12 ~360€
SuperMicro X8DTE-F-O ~395€



I am gona run about 3-5 2k8 R2 server's and 1-2 ubuntu server, all with very litel load on them.

The hardware that i have and that is on the way are these:

CPU : 1x Intel Xeon E5620 (on the way)
Memory : 3x 4GB DDR3 ECC REG 1333MHz DR x4 (on the way)
Raid card : Areca 1680x (at home)
Expander : HP SAS expander (at home)
Case : Lian Li PC-343 + 6x 5-in-3 hotswap bays (at home)
PSU : Corsair HX750 (at home)
VM HDD : 2x intel x25-m (at home)
Storage : 8x1tb WD GP and 8x2TB Samsung EcoGreen (at home)

All advice is welcome

// Merlinen

 

[Valnar]

What did you end up getting? I am looking at the X8STE as a potential, but that X58 chipset is pretty power hungry.

 

[agrikk]

In a lab environment you will probably be more disk I/O bound than CPU bound, except for wen you are booting all of your VMs at once.

I run a set of win2k8 database VMs, various web servers of different OSes on two dual-core ESX hosts and rarely do I ever have CPU problems. If anything I am frustrated by my iSCSI SAN disk I/O. (I run two ESX hosts in a cluster).

Like Valnar mentioned, I'd me more sensitive to power draw of your machines, since they'll be up and running in long stretches (I'm assuming that this is for a home environment).