SuperMicro X10SDV-TLN4F + ESXi

[JimPhreak]

I know this board is very new and there aren't a lot of early adopters but I'm hoping there are 1 or 2 of you out there who have this board and are running ESXi on it. It's been real "fun" trying to get all my components to actually play nice with ESXi but it's finally coming along. However I haven't been able to find a .vib package to install the drivers for the 10gig NICs.

Has anyone gotten this to work? It's literally the last obstacle for me in getting my server up and running 100% (can't install/configure my pfSense VM without those 2 NICs).

 

[OBasel]

I'd either get from the vendor or roll my own at this point. VMware isn't going to say its validated for some time. I'm remembering when we had to custom image just for i210 and i350's even when they were sold in every new intel NIC server.

Here's the guide you need: VMware Front Experience: How to build device drivers for ESXi 5.x

ESXi hardware support is a total B* so welcome to the club. The i350's should be fine tho.

 

[JimPhreak]

I'd either get from the vendor or roll my own at this point. VMware isn't going to say its validated for some time. I'm remembering when we had to custom image just for i210 and i350's even when they were sold in every new intel NIC server.

Here's the guide you need: VMware Front Experience: How to build device drivers for ESXi 5.x

ESXi hardware support is a total B* so welcome to the club. The i350's should be fine tho.

That looks WAY above my head. I"m not a linux guy by any stretch of the imagination.

I'll probably wait till someone else builds the driver package. In the meantime I'll try to get along with just 2 NICs.

 

[MiniKnight]

I mean really you could just vlan pfsense unless you had like a 1gb connection.

Any reason not to just Hyper-V if you've gotten the drivers going for that? pfsense 2.2 works fine in HV now.

 

[JimPhreak]

I mean really you could just vlan pfsense unless you had like a 1gb connection.

Any reason not to just Hyper-V if you've gotten the drivers going for that? pfsense 2.2 works fine in HV now.

Yea I do VLAN pfSense but I currently use 3 NICs (4th would be for dedicated WLAN in the future) in my VM server because I share 2 physical NICs between all my VMs (pfSense LAN, WS 2012 R2, Media Server, Backup Server, Torrent VM, various test VM's, and now will be adding a storage VM) and use 1 for the WAN. Performance is much better that way with regard to my network transfers and video streaming from my storage server currently although those issues may be alleviated now that I'm putting my storage server into a VM of it's own and will be mainly accessing it across vSwitches instead of physical ones.

As for why I'm not going Hyper-V, mainly money and convenience. To go Hyper-V I need to buy a 64GB SATA DOM SSD (only have a 16GB) to install Hyper-V on for $100 and it wouldn't be here till the weekend. I'd also need to buy Windows Server licensing for the server itself since I'm going to want the full GUI being it's my first go at Hyper-V. And then on top of that I have to convert all my vmdk's to vhd's (not a big deal but just adds to the pile).

Really wanted to have my server up by the end of today since I don't house this server where I live currently (have a 2 site network basically) and I'm visiting that location today.

 

[MiniKnight]

There's a guide to managing Hyper-V using a Workgroup instead of a domain. You'd get the GUI using Hyper-V manager and Server Manager running on Windows 8.1. So really it's down to the SATA DOM (or you could just get a 2.5" disk too.)

 

[JimPhreak]

I don't have room for any more drives in this chassis unfortunately. Already have both 2.5" drives full of SSDs, all four 3.5" drive bays full, as well as my M.2 slot and all drives are accounted for.

I also don't have any Windows 8. 1 (Still using 7 as I hate Windows 8) PCs to manage my server from remotely.

 

[MiniKnight]

Only 1 of 2 I can solve: velco for the 2.5" is ssd. Can get almost anywhere too.

But 8.1 fixed 8. Now it is just a better version of 7. Seriously with 10 coming if you only have 1-5 virtual machine hosts hyperv is really good now.

 

[JimPhreak]

Only 1 of 2 I can solve: velco for the 2.5" is ssd. Can get almost anywhere too.

But 8.1 fixed 8. Now it is just a better version of 7. Seriously with 10 coming if you only have 1-5 virtual machine hosts hyperv is really good now.

The charms bar still kills me in 8.1. The fact that MS made it so you can't even manage the charms bar through group policy kills me. I literally had to break DLLs in the System32 folder to ensure that kids in my school district couldn't mess with it.

I am looking forward to Windows 10...but I digress.

I decided to stick with ESXi 5.5 since I have a Standard license which lets me do host level VM backups using Veeam. That and I was able to do the switchover in such a short period of time today. Still only have 2 NICs working but I'll get by for now until someone creates a VIB for the 10gig NICs. I'm sure it will happen soon with how great this board is for home VM labs.