Supermicro X10SL777 30+ drive motherboard

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dweeb

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Nov 21, 2014
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Sorry, as far as I know it doesn’t exist (yet), but “X10SL777” could be the designation if Supermicro would take that next step and create what I think would be just about the perfect motherboard for an ultra-flexible home office/small office file/storage server running under VMWare’s ESXi. It sure would be nice to get lots of disk controllers while retaining a lower build out cost and lower power requirements.

All they need to do is take their beautiful X10SL7, switch to a C226 North Bridge (to get all SATA ports up to 6Gb/s), add a PEX8747 lane multiplier and add two additional onboard LSI 2308s. Two more i210-AT NICs would be nice too. Hopefully, we could get a motherboard with several high quality integrated drive controllers at a much, much lower price than using add-on PCIe slot based controllers.

My “perfect motherboard” thinking is primarily for those ZFS file systems (think FreeBSD/NAS4Free/etc.) where each virtual machine needs to utilize VT-d based Directed I/O (PCI pass-through) to the controllers in order to ensure ESXi doesn’t diddle-up the ZFS data. More controllers mean more VMs can utilize Directed I/O. However, what I’d also like to try is assign all 3 LSI2308s to one VM and stripe each 6 drive RAIDZ2 vDev across all 3 controllers. In other words, 2 drives per vDev per controller. With RAIDZ2 that allows for one controller failure or two drive failures without a service outage. If needed, you could boot ESXi from a USB drive or a small HBA in the x4 PCIe slot, freeing up the onboard C226 Lynx Point controller…and there’s also that other x8 PCIe slot just begging for another 2308 based LSI product. So, if you booted ESXI from a USB drive, and assume one controller per PCIe slot and one drive per PCIe lane on the slots, you could end up with 6 controllers: 3 onboard LSI2308 (24 drives), 1 onboard C226 Lynx Point controller (6 drives), 1 PCIe x8 based LSI2308 (8 drives), and 1 PCIe x4 based whatever (4 drives), for a grand total of 42 drives (watch-out BackBlaze Storage Pod). That works for me, but it’s still controller count, not outrageous drive count I’m after!

There is another motherboard option in the E3-1200 / LGA 1150 arena that’s already available as a starting point, that being the ASRock C226WS+. It supports VT-d and utilizes a PEX8747, so it has four PCIe x8 slots, just add one controller to each slot. The issue there is the total build-out cost when using add-ons vs. motherboard integrated controllers. But ASRock is not out of the race! They also have the somewhat pricey E3C224D4I-14S with an integrated LSI2308, but it would need the same modifications as the X10SL7.

Supermicro, ASRock, I’m available to test one of the early production units as soon as you can Fed-Ex it!

Food for thought…the stuff of dreams…
 

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levak

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Sep 22, 2013
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Bad thing about that is... What if one controller dies? You need to buy a pcie one and what if there are no free slots since they are used up by onboard controllers and 10g lan that you have in pcie slot...
 

MiniKnight

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Mar 30, 2012
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I really like the imagination it took for this.

Why C226? Why not C612? If you're adding this many PCIe components, I'd want 40-80 lanes (UP/ DP).
 

dweeb

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Nov 21, 2014
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Bad thing about that is... What if one controller dies? You need to buy a pcie one and what if there are no free slots since they are used up by onboard controllers and 10g lan that you have in pcie slot...
I guess I'll need to wait for the X10SL7777 version so I can have one LSI2308 in reserve.
 

dweeb

New Member
Nov 21, 2014
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I really like the imagination it took for this.

Why C226? Why not C612? If you're adding this many PCIe components, I'd want 40-80 lanes (UP/ DP).
That's my kind of dreaming! Unfortunately, I've never seen a C612 mated to a socket 1150, thus the need for the PEX8747 I guess. But while we're dreaming, let's make sure we get mini-SAS connectors on the X10SL777 for at least the LSI2308s.
 

MiniKnight

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Mar 30, 2012
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That's my kind of dreaming! Unfortunately, I've never seen a C612 mated to a socket 1150, thus the need for the PEX8747 I guess. But while we're dreaming, let's make sure we get mini-SAS connectors on the X10SL777 for at least the LSI2308s.
I totally get why. I'm just saying you could not use the PEX chip and just get native lanes. V3's are great on power consumption.