Dual 2011 socket mobo for gaming and Type 2 hypervisor

[Vitaly Markovsky]

Hi guys (and gals),

Have some spare parts from retired servers, and wanted to update my older machine at home, and combine it to both a gaming machine (not used often for that purpose, but enough) and still run some virtual machines from home (likely with Virtualbox).

I have a pair of E5-2650 V2 CPUs and a bunch of DDR3 ram (128GB), so was looking at the C602 chipset boards. The one I have been eyeing up is the Super Micro X9DRH-IF , as it has 16 RAM slots (matches how much RAM I have) and a PCIe x16 slot for my GTX970.

The reason I was looking at this board is bc I can see that SM offers Win10 drivers (at least for the chipset, LAN, and SATA/SCU).

Some of the other boards, like the GIGABYTE GA-7PESH2 , don't have explicit Windows 10 drivers, and I am not sure if Win10 will find them on its own (or how stable they will be).

Has anyone here had good experiences with using a dual 2011 board with a gaming video card (for the purpose of gaming, that is, not mining) that they can chime in on using Win10? My budget is about $300-350 for the board, which I am seeing enough of (used) on the bay.

Another one I was eyeing up was Supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+ but not sure that will fit in my case (EATX will but not sure about Enhanced EATX - also seeing some auctions with version 1.10 that claim v2 CPU support, where I thought I read somewhere that 1.20 was required, perhaps a BIOS update changed this).

Any thoughts or guidance?

Thanks very much in advance!

 

[Nizmo]

Personally I use Server 2016 and most VMs run WIndows 10. When you do this you get some pretty neat features especially when coupled to a GPU! You'll see that even with RemoteFX, your VM's can run games or benchmarks very well (Unigine). GTX 1080's or better recommended. GRID even better.

I use Gigabyte boards personally, MW-50, MD-70, MG50-G20, R280, G250, all Dual-cpu boards except 1.

Since recent CPU issues, most vendors have come up with new BIOS avail. All the boards in my case.

Go 1 step further with NVMe.

 

[Vitaly Markovsky]

@Nizmo thanks very much for the reply! I had grand plans of getting a GTX1080 finally this year, but then bitcoin came along and blew it out of my price range. As much as I would love to have Server 2016 at home with desktop experience, I don't have 7 bills to spend on it either. I know Virtualbox has its limitations, but it's effective for me as most of the machines we run in the shop are various flavors of Linux (none of which use GPU acceleration, except the video streaming ones, but I would not do that from home).

I mean I see things like this on eBay: Windows Server 2016 Standard 16 Core but wonder once I activate if I will get a couple dudes wearing suits showing up to my door asking for an audit of my licensing (even tho for home use seems not cost effective for them). Has anyone bought any of these? Is anyone who has responding from prison?

 

[Nizmo]

I know of many who do buy on Ebay without any issues. However I believe the sellers are selling MSDN keys, which is a no-no but still isn't your problem.

I know the DC version is $6K ish? Plus CAL's... It gets expensive for sure.

Why not grab a trial Server 2016, good for 180 days to play with.

 

[Vitaly Markovsky]

So wound up getting the X9DRH, figured should be plenty for my needs (considering my drives will be spun via raid controller, and I will only use a single graphics card as this machine will be mostly workstation). Any benefits to using Server 2016 as a workstation with desktop experience as far as virtualization?

I use KVM/oVirt at work, and this machine was originally going to be Windows 10 Pro with Virtualbox. I know that Hyper-V is also available, is the Server 2016 version of Hyper-V more robust than the Win 10 version? Any advantages to using Server 2016 w/Hyper-V instead of Win10/Virtualbox or win10/Hyper-V?

The primary usage of this machine will be as a desktop, and many of the virtual machines will be linux in my case. The only app I need to really to work is Quicken (for wifey) and Adobe Photoshop (and my Steam games of course ) otherwise I could also spin up a Win10 machine for these purposes, but that could lead to objections of obfuscation from wifey.

The whole point of this exercise to downsize to just one big desktop (internally) instead of having my hypervisor be a separate running machine, as it is now.

 

[Nizmo]

Maybe you would look into System Center 2016 as well.

I use Virtual Machine Manager and a Cluster of 16 Server hosts, and i can manage many CentOs, Debian, Windows VM's with ease.

I cant speak of Server 16 in workstation use, but hey why not!

 

[Joel]

How about Proxmox on the host with GPU passthrough to Windows VM?