Motherboard Recommendations

[Eric Faden]

Hey Everyone,

I'm looking to build a shallow (< 15") 1 to 2U Rackmount virtualization server to run some VMs (Plex, etc via Proxmox). It doesn't need a ton of storage as I already have a NAS setup, but I'm having trouble finding a board to use. My requirements are:

• Size - ITX ideally, or possibly uATX
• Processor - Nothing crazy, but enough to run plex and some other simple stuff.
• 10 GbE or SFP+ (for backbone to NAS)
• PCI slot for GPU (for hardware transcoding)
• IPMI

I haven't really found many because of the 10 GbE requirement. Since ITX only have a single PCIe and thus I would have to decide between a GPU and a SFP+ card (Mellanox) if I went ITX without 10 GbE. If I got uATX I could put a Mellanox SFP+ and a GPU so that would work, but I was trying to stay ITX for the depth. I only really need 2 x SATA +/- SATADOM for the OS.

Thoughts?

Only ones I have really found are AsRock Rack X570D4I-2T or Supermicro X11SDV servies and older boards like the ( Gigabyte MB10-DS3 , ASRock D1541D4I-2L2T, Supermicro x10sdv-tln4f )....

Anyone have other suggestions?

 

[hmw]

Hey Everyone,

I'm looking to build a shallow (< 15") 1 to 2U Rackmount virtualization server to run some VMs (Plex, etc via Proxmox). It doesn't need a ton of storage as I already have a NAS setup, but I'm having trouble finding a board to use. My requirements are:

• Size - ITX ideally, or possibly uATX
• Processor - Nothing crazy, but enough to run plex and some other simple stuff.
• 10 GbE or SFP+ (for backbone to NAS)
• PCI slot for GPU (for hardware transcoding)
• IPMI

I haven't really found many because of the 10 GbE requirement. Since ITX only have a single PCIe and thus I would have to decide between a GPU and a SFP+ card (Mellanox) if I went ITX without 10 GbE. If I got uATX I could put a Mellanox SFP+ and a GPU so that would work, but I was trying to stay ITX for the depth. I only really need 2 x SATA +/- SATADOM for the OS.

Thoughts?

Only ones I have really found are AsRock Rack X570D4I-2T or Supermicro X11SDV servies and older boards like the ( Gigabyte MB10-DS3 , ASRock D1541D4I-2L2T, Supermicro x10sdv-tln4f )....

Anyone have other suggestions?

You could get an AsRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 - and use Thunderbolt to 10GbE. There's no IPMI though.

If you can go 3U to 4U, there's plenty of chassis that are 3U/4U and can accommodate mATX or ATX motherboards.

 

[jpmomo]

You should look into the second gen Xeon D mb from supermicro. They have both itx and flex-atx. They also come with up to 4 x 10G onboard nics.