frankdenneman
Expert
Expert

Erik,

Please read the asus manuals if you plan to install 4GB. Most modern asus motherboards reserve a chunkload of memory for other "critical functions".

I have build two ESX servers based on the asus p5b-v motherboard, i've installed 4GB with 4 1GB memory modules. The Board only presents 2.8GB of memory. A setting in the bios can override the memory reservations, which makes the 4GB fully addressable, but the system isn't running stable after that point.

About the p5m2/sas board. I think the board is excellent for home/testlab use. Sure it won't be as fast as big production ESX servers, but it's still fast enough for the occassional testing.

It offers a disk controller and two onboard nics who work in ESX. I bought a p5b-v and had to buy a disk controller and a couple of Nics to get ESX to work. It would have been cheaper for me if the p5m2 was available at that time.

Blogging: frankdenneman.nl Twitter: @frankdenneman Co-author: vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical Deepdive, vSphere 5x Clustering Deepdive series
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