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Re: vt-d enabled Ivy Bridge motherboard recommendations

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I've got ESXi 5.0u1 running on an Intel DQ77KB motherboard with an I7-3770s CPU inside a min-box M350 case, and it works.  I am going to use this in a backup site (my vacation home) for my little consulting business.  Space is tight in the closet where it's intended to go which is why I picked the form factor.  The vt-d stuff works, although if you pass through the on board USB controller it's kind of flaky and the VMs don't recognize it as USB 3.  I ended up buying a seperate PCI express USB 3 card, and a PCI express wireless card.  These both pass through just fine to the VMs.

 

The only thing I've noticed that isn't great is that the write speed on the disk, at least when copying VMs onto the machine, isn't very good.  From what I've read it's because ESXi does a lot of checkpointing and log synchronization type stuff while writing to datastores, and because the disk controller on the board doesn't have any write cache, and apparently ESXi doesn't either, performace suffers.  I've got a 6 gb/sec 1tb hard drive, and when uploading VMs to the box across a local network with a 1gb network connection and jumbo frames enabled, I'm still only getting about 30 megabytes per second transfer rate.  I'm not sure that this is going to matter for the VMs so much because the VM o/s typically has its own write cache, although I haven't done enough testing yet to see if it matters to the VMs or not.    As this is intended to be a backup box, and due to the case size  constraints, I don't have a second drive for a RAID configuration, even  though I think the board supports it.    

 

I'd also caution you about putting ESXi 5.1 on a box you intend to use PCI passthrough with.  I tried it and had to go back because of problems.  See this thread:    http://communities.vmware.com/thread/417736?start=0&tstart=0


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