Looking for an inexpensive solution to build around M1015 HBAs

[RimBlock]

No problems encountered on this board with ESXi 5 for me. Works fine although I am having fun trying to find out what USB ports are what so I can passthrough one to my WHS for backing up to a USB disk. As I installed ESXi to a USB stick, last time I tried I managed to passthrough the controller with the stick attached which caused all sort of issues once the server came up as I am sure you can imagine. Managed to recover and am taking a breather before trying that again.

The machine runs great with SSD, WD Scorpios and WD Black/Green 3.5" drives either on the M1015 or off the motherboard controller.

Note: I do not use the onboard NIC so do not know if it is supported. I only run with Intel NICs in the PCIe / PCI slots on the board. This is something I would checkout if you have not done so already.

The only thing is that it is still major overkill for what I am using it for but better than the same machine just being used to share files without ESXi on it.

RB

 

[dba]

Hello,

I've just purchased a few cheap IBM M1015 HBAs, and have learned that motherboard compatibility can be an issue.

I plan on using the system(s) for home lab test/dev work, and file serving.

I will probably load ESXi up on the boxes and would plan to have 4-6 VMs running fairly low loads.

I'd ideally like to virtualize the SAN as well, probably Nexenta Community Edition.

Any tips on Motherboard & Processors for this? I'm happy with either AMD or Intel. Best price to performance ratio always makes me smile.

Thanks in advance,

-- SS

Until recently my main server was an Asus KGPE-D16 motherboard and I ran it with an IBM M1015 card that had been re-flashed to LSI. In addition, I had three more LSI HBAs and an Asus PIKE RAID card (all based on the same SAS2008 controller) for a total of five LSI-based cards. All five controllers showed up under the single LSI firmware image, which was delightful. I am quite sure that it would have worked identically had they been five M1015 cards instead. The setup was rock solid reliable and insanely fast with two 8-core AMD processors. It was mostly a database machine but it also ran Hyper-V with 14 VMs.

At $400 it's not a cheap motherboard, but in a Norco chassis loaded brimming with drive bays and eBay-source RAID cards, it had an unbeatable price to performance ratio. The KGPE-D16 MOBO comes with web-based management standard, including web-based KVM, web based power on/off, and web-based temperature and fan monitoring. One little power saving trick I use is to run the machine on just a few cores in a single CPU but then use the web-based KVM to reboot in order to turn on the second CPU and the other cores when I needed the power.

By the way, I ended up losing the SAN altogether, using the Norco disk slots to create an SSD RAID array on the Windows 2008R2 host. The VMs each got a very healthy 500MB/Second disk I/O, even using dynamic disks and with multiple snapshots! I had a second array of huge/slow spinning disks that I used to provide large drives to the VMs that needed them.

The downside is that the Norco chassis are server-level loud unless you replace all six fans - and that's not cheap.