[OpenIndiana-discuss] i7 cpu that accepts ECC Ram

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Sat, 26 Jan 2013, Harry Putnam wrote:

> Summary:
> I hope someone here can tell me if there is a setup using recent i7
> cpus that supports ECC ram.

Typically such CPUs are "Xeon" branded and even the name Xeon is not 
sufficient to indicate that ECC RAM is supported.  You need to check 
Intel's product page for the specific CPU and also check the 
motherboard support.  Then you need to make sure to specify ECC 
memory.

As you noticed, AMD CPUs are much better about supporting ECC but 
there are some recent AMD CPUs which don't support ECC.

> Is there a motherboard that supports both?

If you are not dead-set on having an an i7 CPU, then there are many 
more options.  SuperMicro makes some nice motherboards which work with 
Xeon CPUs and support ECC memory and built-in audio.  These 
motherboards are basically server-class motherboards with 
"workstation" options.  These run VirtualBox very well.

Here are some examples.  I think that OpenIndiana should work on all 
three:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9SRA.cfm

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9DAL-i.cfm

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9DAi.cfm

> Further, please feel free to suggest the best setup in your opinion
> for running OI, (primarily for the zfs based storage setup with
> several mirrored pairs of discs) but also at least one vm with a win7
> based guest capable of running all the adobe tools and any of the
> associated cpu intensive chores involved with editing video and other
> intensive Graphics chores.
>
> Note: This would be a single user setup.

As long as you choose good quality hardware and make sure that 
OpenIndiana supports the devices, then you should be fine.  Mirrored 
boot disks are a wise idea.

If you have the money, you can buy a chassis which supports 8 hot-swap 
disks plus two fixed disks.  For example, the 743TQ-1200B-SQ is an 
excellent choice (very solid and quiet) except for the annoying 
problem that the USB ports at the front are USB 3.0 and OpenIndiana 
does not support them yet.  The motherboards provide plenty of USB 2.0 
ports but they must all go to the back of the unit.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/743/SC743TQ-1200-SQ.cfm

That is what I have.  I use the fixed disk slots for the boot drives 
so that all 8 hot-swap slots can be used for a main storage pool.  As 
a small annoyance, I already had to replace both of the fixed boot 
drives whereas the hot-swap drives had no problem.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/