Recent content by jbraband

  1. J

    Supermicro CSE-503-200B Riser Card

    i never did get this built. I ended up downcycling hardware for a pfsense box. now that I am familiar with pfSense, were I to do this build now, I would forgo the riser and third NIC. with a vlan capable switch (Dell PowerConnect 2724 for me) you can use two physical NICs, one for WAN and one...
  2. J

    'May'

    the only tricky part is getting access to the ESXi hypervisor partitions outside the ESXi environment. I have mine installed on a USB key and all i had to do was use a linux LIVE boot disk, mount the usb drive, copy the modified oem.tgz over, and reboot. i was able to do it remotely with the...
  3. J

    'May'

    here's the [H] thread regarding the 82579LM NIC on some of the supermicro X9 boards: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1607992 my X9SCM-F, E3-1230 and ESXi 4.1 U1 are all working swimmingly with Chilly's oem.tgz for 82579LM NIC recognition. my understanding is that its an unsupported NIC...
  4. J

    SuperMicro X8SIA-F

    huh, i stand corrected. i like it when i'm wrong such that I now have more options by passing up to 4 PCIe devices to a VM. thanks PigLover!
  5. J

    SuperMicro X8SIA-F

    regardless of the bridge chip, ESXi will only allow you to passthrough two PCI devices anyways. it could be two HBAs, two NICs, or one of each, etc... so the only limitation the bridge puts on you is not being able to pass a third and fourth PCI device to a different VM. I'm not sure, but I...
  6. J

    Intel C202, C204, C206 Xeon E3 Bromolow Motherboards Thread

    i can confirm PigLover's confirmation that Chilly's oem.tgz works for the X9SCM-F's second NIC.
  7. J

    Solaris Express 11 + ESXi + VTd

    PigLover mentioned similar problems with stability with SE11 in ESXi in this thread. He said that he had to reduce the number of virtual cores to 2 to get stability. I personally have no working knowledge of this, but remember PigLover's comment about SE11/ESXi stability and wanted to point...
  8. J

    ZFS, 9211-8i, HP SAS Expander and 10x7k3000 2TB drives...

    very good information, thank you very much for that. I have been muddling the last couple weeks on this exact system architecture to achieve disk redundancy with WHS2011. The only major difference is the SAN OS, i was planning on going OpenIndiana, but am flexible enough to switch that up after...
  9. J

    ZFS, 9211-8i, HP SAS Expander and 10x7k3000 2TB drives...

    PigLover, I see in this thread that you were pleased with the performance you were seeing on the ZFS pools. between your last post in this thread, and your thread on 10GigE in the networking forum, it seems that this is now a non-virtualized SAN/NAS. when you swapped the 9211-8i for the M1015...
  10. J

    Feasible setup for WHSv2?

    for what its worth, my use of the storage is going to be streaming HD mkvs and ISO to a sandy bridge HTPC over a 1gig network. I could easily go point to point on that, but dont think i'll have an issue with latency on the network with the dell 2724 i picked up. oh, and of course crucial "can...
  11. J

    Feasible setup for WHSv2?

    @nitrobass well, right now i have nothing but a dream and an unpurchased newegg shopping cart :D i have been all over the place planning this build the past couple weeks. zfs recently cropped up into my mind this week and i like what i see. now i am figuring out the best way to achieve it...
  12. J

    Hardware stress testing best practices

    for my personal edification, i'm looking more at stress testing. from my own internet research, it seems that performance benchmarking is more widely covered than stress testing. example: there are HDD stress testing apps that i've come across that are commercial. I'm looking for whether those...
  13. J

    Hardware stress testing best practices

    Patrick, what about an article (or really could be easily expanded to a whole series of articles) about stress testing new hardware. The obvious summary would be ServeTheHome best practices for such testing. My short list of things that I'd personally like to know more about is below. i...
  14. J

    Feasible setup for WHSv2?

    NfiniteZERO and/or Patrick, have either of you seen progress on this all-in-one front? I'm mentally moving away from raid to a setup like whats described here. just wondering if there are any definitive routes to go that are acceptable. I read through gea's all-in-one guide and it all makes...
  15. J

    Raid 1/10 for LGA775 consumer board

    Good afternoon everyone, I have a newegg wishlist stocked with an E3, x9scm, norco case, etc (i.e. the works), but its tallying up to $1900. a bit above what i'm comfortable with. I recently upgrade my main workstation to the sandy bridge platform, which leaves my now unused 775 parts on the...