Whitebox motherboard for IBM M5015?

[oliversl]

Hi, 1st post here.

I'm planning buying a IBM M5015 or M5014. I was thinking about a M1015 but the not having a battery and no write-back seems to be an issue.

My question is if the M5015 would work with a desktop motherboard (asus or intel)?

I want a vSphere whitebox, with 4 drive in RAID10. Maybe a 2nd raid1 of 128GB SSD


Many thanks
Oliver

 

[Patrick]

Welcome to the forums.

What kind of CPU do you need and how much memory?

 

[oliversl]

Hi Patrick, thanks for the welcome.

The idea is to try with all desktop components, so it will be a i5 current gen cpu.

The biggest investment will be the raid card with battery, and possibly the SSDs.

Thanks
Oliver

 

[mrkrad]

will come out cheaper with a nehalem with 8gb RDIMM ECC honestly. Ram prices are insane lately on non-rdimm product.

last box I got was a dl320 G6 for $99 with p410/512BBWC. Light cpu, but that was easy to take care of, solid product. 72gb of ram was $450 and some SSD (840 pro). Makes a nice server. bunch of quad core 8SFF/p410/rps/8gb models recent sold for $385.

you may find some day that the true esxi experience can only be had with a server. Dealing with firmware, insane bios settings, irq's, card placement, cooling, power.

After ESXi is up, it doesn't ever come down you know? Maybe for patches if necessary but most folks go for large uptimes and the dl320 G6 I have (e5620) pulls about 99W idle which is really efficient compared to my old DL380 G5 which I can't get under 300-400watts for far less mojo.

 

[oliversl]

Thanks mrkrad,
do you use asus or gigabyte motherboard?

Oliver

 

[mrkrad]

I use oem only. I have found in my years of experience, that whiteboxing sucks butt and is an immense waste of time. Find a buddy that can get you super deals. You'd be surprised how good deal hunters can do their work.

Time is money.. With age you will come to respect this immensely.

 

[oliversl]

By OEM you mean server OEMs? The problem is that in the country I live IBM servers are more expensive than in the USA. So I was thinking about a good raid card with a clon workstation.

I'm learning good stuff in this forums, thanks for the help

Oliver

 

[mrkrad]

No kidding, here I got DL320 G6 for $99 (shipped no less).

 

[oliversl]

mmm, thanks mrkrad, I'm searching on google and ebay, there are some wild results! There are a whole industry of used servers, even in ibm.com website they have a phone number to call and buy them.

Thanks for the tip.

I will search if there a gigabyte or other motherboard where the M5015 will work.