Looking for an inexpensive solution to build around M1015 HBAs

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ssherwood

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Oct 7, 2011
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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
 

mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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LSI and Gigabyte Mobo's seem have issues, looks like Gigabyte optimise their BIOS's too much, so probably avoid this.

There is a thread(s) elsewhere discussing the merits of low power/cheap Mobo setups just as you are after.
I wouldn't mind trying a Dual Core Atom setup with RAID for a home box.
I currently have a XEON x3470 based sytem on an ASrock P55 Mobo, this didn't cost me much, the H200 was going to go in here to run my SSD's.
 

ssherwood

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Oct 7, 2011
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Hey there - thanks for the reply.

As I want to virtualize, I was thinking of something with a little more pep than an Atom based setup, especially as these typically accept no more than 2-4GB of RAM.

I'd ideally like to have at least 8GB of RAM to start - I'm not fussed if it is ECC or not. ZFS has built in corruption detection, and this is a test/home environment so I can accept a slightly higher risk to help keep the cost lower. ZFS also uses any available RAM as cache, so I may well want to start with more.

Are ASUS consumer boards OK? I thought I read something over at another forum about problems with the SMBus, but I have been reading a lot of posts lately and may be confused.
 

mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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Not had an ASUS board for years.

ASUS make boards that look nice, but I don't always think they are any longer the best.
Competing with Gigabyte etc for that extra 1fps leads to issues (as Gigabyte and LSI)
My Asrock board has been great, it supports vt-d as does my CPU.
Not the fastest kid on the block but it gets there in the end where it matters.
 

ssherwood

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Oct 7, 2011
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Doesn't ASUS make Asrock?

Are you saying that you've run a M1015 on Asrock without issues? That may well be good enough for me. :)

Thanks again.
 

mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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ASrock came to be from ASUS, they are seperate entities now ?

I choose Asrock as it supported the Xeon X34xx cpu's, ASUS officially don't

I have not had a M1015 running on an Asrock, or any other LSI card yet.
The Dell H200 (LSI9211) experiment is not working due to known BIOS flashing issue.
I prefered to get a H200 as the 9211 did quite a bit better in RAID0 tests (Tom's HW) over the 9240 (M1015) and even the 9260
No use having 500MB/s SSD's but only getting 1/2 the speed with Intel SATA2 and even worse with Marvell 9128
But prices seem to going up up up now that these cards work as HBA really well in any machine.
So my $10 broken BIOS was not a huge loss, but will need to find another card soon.

Back to your needs.
Do you want Integrated graphics or nvida/ATI ?
Will affect motherboard with either 1 or 1x PCIe 16/8 slot(s)
 
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ssherwood

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Oct 7, 2011
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Sorry - missed one of your questions. For my purposes, I think integrated graphics are fine.

Thanks!
 

ssherwood

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Oct 7, 2011
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Asrock do a Mini-ITX 1155 Mobo with 1x 16xPCIe slot if you like integrated the Z68M-ITX/HT
You could make you self a little machine with lot of storage oomph
Nice - but I think I want something more full sized. I've already got the chassis, a CoolerMaster HAF 912 so I can take a full sized ATX board with lots of room for expansion.

As its going to be hosting VMs, I'd like the ability to have multiple network interfaces as well. I'll probably end up running a FreeBSD firewall for my home network called pfSense as a VM on the same box.

It would be great for the motherboard to have either integrated graphics plus 2 16 lane PCI Express 2.0 slots (one that is only 8x would be OK I guess), or 3 16 lane slots, 1 for a video card, the other two for HBAs.

I also am thinking of a larger sized chassis as I've got 8 Hitachi 7k3000 drives for the storage which tend to run hotter than some, so I don't want to cram them in too tight.
 

cactus

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Jan 25, 2011
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I use a Asus P6X58D-e with my 1015s and ESXi. I also flashed another 1015 with a Asus P5Q something mobo with no problem. I also have a few Asus desktops, I seem to have good luck with them and have only had one x58 board die after a year of heavy use of a 4.2GHz 930. I have no experience with ASrock but there is a long thread on [H] about that mITX z68 board and its weak cpu power system, needs 65w chips or will throttle when put under load. From my experience consumer boards are limited for virtualization. I have run out of PCI-e on my x58 with 4 cards in it, built in dual Intel NICs on server boards are really nice. I would suggest getting a UP server board and an i3 or lower E3. Also, for my home environment, ram and PCI-e lanes have been bigger limiting factors over CPU power for me. I have tried to get a video card to passthough and haven't been successful on ESXi 4.1

I have 6 or 7 VMs running at any one time on 24GB of ram and cpu usage <2GHz most of the time.
 

mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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Ah so you really want something not cheap at all then.

I have a Cooler Master Scout Case similar in size to the HAF 912 I think.
Beware of Mobo's with the SATA connectors at the bottom edge (horizontal) as this makes connecting them with a HDD cage very awkward.
But with a LSI based card this will be no issue.

1155/1156 Chipset with 2x PCIe 16x slots run at 8x each if there is a card in both.
So should you have PCIe 16x Graphics card it will run at 8x
I have a nVidia GTX 465 (modded to a 470) and I notice no real difference.
It will only make a difference should you be wanting to run the newest game at max settings.
But running games like that on a storage server is probably not a good idea.

How about an ASUS P8B WS ?

Supports i3 CPU's, Pentium Gxx and Xeon E3
Integrated Graphics (well you need to choose a CPU with it on)
32GB RAM max
C206 Chipset
4 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x16, x4, x4 or x8, x8, x4, x4)
2x 1Gbit LAN
Full ATX format

Plenty of scope to add things
BUT remember:
2x 16xPCIe slots used = 8x and 8x for each (not specified but my 1156 does this)
3x 16xPCIe slots used = 16x and 4x and 4x
4x 16xPCIe slots used = 8x and 8x and 4x and 4x

With more cards the speed gets more awkard, you'd be best of 4 cards rather than 3 with LSI controller(s)
 

ssherwood

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Oct 7, 2011
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I use a Asus P6X58D-e with my 1015s and ESXi. I also flashed another 1015 with a Asus P5Q something mobo with no problem. ...
I actually have an old P5Q, but it only has 1 PCI Express slot. I assumed it would only work with a video card as a result...

Did they make a P5Q with integrated graphics as well? That might be interesting as I have an old processor I could use.... The problem might be finding a PCI video adapter.
 

ssherwood

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Oct 7, 2011
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Ah so you really want something not cheap at all then.
...

1155/1156 Chipset with 2x PCIe 16x slots run at 8x each if there is a card in both.
So should you have PCIe 16x Graphics card it will run at 8x

...

How about an ASUS P8B WS ?

Supports i3 CPU's, Pentium Gxx and Xeon E3
Integrated Graphics (well you need to choose a CPU with it on)
32GB RAM max
C206 Chipset
4 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x16, x4, x4 or x8, x8, x4, x4)
2x 1Gbit LAN
Full ATX format

Plenty of scope to add things
BUT remember:
2x 16xPCIe slots used = 8x and 8x for each (not specified but my 1156 does this)
3x 16xPCIe slots used = 16x and 4x and 4x
4x 16xPCIe slots used = 8x and 8x and 4x and 4x

With more cards the speed gets more awkard, you'd be best of 4 cards rather than 3 with LSI controller(s)
Cheap is relative I suppose :)

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C202_C204/X9SCL_-F.cfm

This looks interesting, and is almost $100 cheaper than the Asus board. I wish it had a 1x or PCI slot in addition to the two 8x + one 4x slot, but I suppose it would work. I'd have to populate the 4x slot with a multiple NIC card, leaving only the two 8x slots for HBAs.

The ASUS does have everything I'm looking for though - strange that they only include a DVI port for video. Guess I'll have to abandon my old CRT in the closet. :)

I had been looking at AMD honestly as I thought the 6 core 1100T processor would be the best bang for my buck for the VMs, but I'm sure a i7-2600K would rock too... of course, the 1100T can be had for about $180, while the 2600K is $320ish.

The supermicro has IPMI as well which would be very nice...

Time to think a bit more.
 

apnar

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Mar 5, 2011
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The ASUS does have everything I'm looking for though - strange that they only include a DVI port for video. Guess I'll have to abandon my old CRT in the closet. :)
I can't speak to the ASUS board in particular, but I've had a couple other boards that only had DVI or DVI and HDMI. In all those cases the DVI was a DVI-I connection which has the VGA pins live in it, you just need a tiny dongle to convert from DVD-I to VGA.
 

ssherwood

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Oct 7, 2011
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I can't speak to the ASUS board in particular, but I've had a couple other boards that only had DVI or DVI and HDMI. In all those cases the DVI was a DVI-I connection which has the VGA pins live in it, you just need a tiny dongle to convert from DVD-I to VGA.
Thanks - I just looked up the specs for the ASUS board above, and it is in fact a DVI-I port, so I should be able to use a dongle if I go that way.

Serves me right for assuming :)

Thanks.
 

RimBlock

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Sep 18, 2011
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I am running an ASRock Extreme 4 (Z68) board with two M1015 controllers (flashed with LSI IT firmware) and an Intel ET dual port network card all in a Norco 20 hotswap bay case.

The two M1015s take care of 16 drives and the onboard SATA deals with the other 6 (4 external and 2 internal).

I run WHS 2011 and 3x CentOS 5 vms (Transmission/LAMP/Minecraft) via ESXi 5 with VT-d passthrough to the WHS for both M1015 controllers for native Windows access to the drives, 1xVT-d passthrough of a Intel ET nic port for the WHS and the other for the Transmission VM. The rest of the networking goes through an Intel PCI nic (GT IIRC) but this one does not support VT-d passthrough.

Due to the machine being just for home use I downgraded it from 16GB ram to 8GB and it is using a i5 2400 (minimium available to me with VT-d as well as VT-x support).

Finding a board with VT-d support is a nightmare as it seems half the time it is listed in specs and Bios config guides but has been disabled from the Bios, especially with P67/H67 boards. This was one of only two boards where I could find a confirmation of supporting VT-d from an actual user test (details here - pdf)

RB
 

mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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I've got a VT-d setting in my ASRock P55 Deluxe3 board BIOS.
Never actually tested it, do have a Xeon X3470 that supports it though.
Must do so when my bits arrive.
 

ssherwood

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Oct 7, 2011
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I am running an ASRock Extreme 4 (Z68) board with two M1015 controllers (flashed with LSI IT firmware) and an Intel ET dual port network card all in a Norco 20 hotswap bay case.
...
Thanks for that RB - I had actually found out about the same board through that site as well and opted for it. (http://tinkertry.com/vmdirectpath/)

Have you had any stability issues with it? I almost cancelled my order to go with the MSI board instead when I saw what some Windows users were going through.

That being said, as I intend to use ESXi, I decided to take a chance, especially with the IOMMU (VT-D) support.

I've purchased 3 M1015 cards, but only plan to use one in this chassis with 8x2TB Hitachi 7K3000 drives (extracted from XL2000 units I have found on sale for about $60 each!)

I've opted for :

Intel i7-2600
ASRock Z68 Extreme 4
Corsair Vengeance 16GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM
Corsair TX750 PSU
Cooler Master HAF 912 chassis

I'll likely install ESXi on a 750GB Samsung F4 drive, and I plan to use either Nexentastor or Napp-IT for ZFS based file storage. I have an older OCZ 60GB Vertex 2 SSD that I'll leverage for caching for ZFS.

... would have loved the K version, but no VT-D support with that :(