Topic title should read:- Mainboard that supports VT-d / IOMMU

I'm using this as an excuse to buy a new PC so bear with me.

Sooo, in order to reduce the number of boxes we have around I'm going to virtualise everything into a single (maybe 2) machine. I've told the Missus this will also reduce our power bill which is mostly comprised of my IT hardware (and her TV).

Will be running VMware ESXi 5 so needs a compatible chipset and it MUST support PCIe device passthrough (VT-d / IOMMU) so I can use it as a desktop machine as well as running all the VMs. Like this chap is doing http://networkingbun...ts/vmdirectpath

Will install 32G of RAM (the most my ESXi licence allows).

I'm a bit of an Intel junkie, but I could possibly be converted away to AMD if the price/performance was good.

Thoughts, recommendations?

Budget for mainboard, processor (i7 or AMD equivalent), cooler and memory, <40k (Case, 1000W PSU and GPU already in stock)

From you link, this seems like a good start:

* Asus P6T

* Intel Core i7 920 2.6Hz running at 3.0Ghz

* 6Gb of RAM

* C-Audio USB Sound Card

* Intel Pro 1000 GT

* ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro (from a Dell Optiplex 755) w/ 256Gb RAM

You might want to upgrade the cpu.

I suspect anything newer will run what you are looking at doing.

This subject is interesting to me at the moment. I've played around with VM's (at home) a bit, but only using Microsoft's Hyper-V.

At my office I have a server running MS Server 2008R2 with Exchange etc and 7-8 individual workstation PC's and am thinking about putting everything in one reasonably powerful box.

Is there any particular reason to use VMware instead of Hyper-V? Since I'm somewhat familiar with the latter, that seems easier to me.

What on earth are you trying to achieve?

If you want complete separate enviroments on the same computer just use dual boot.

IF you want to save money on power use low power cpus. BTW 32gb of ram is over kill.

Reasons to use VM's:

Your a VPS/VDS Host.

Your a hacker.

Your a gold farmer.

You like linux access on ya desktop.

Gigabyte have better options over Asus