So, you’ve decided to buy a Supermicro X11 Xeon E (Coffee Lake) board...

[cb27]

I'm a bit new to the world of servers though I've been building, repairing PCs and laptops for donkeys years.
I stumbled across this post whilst researching the X11SCM-F and having just registered, I've just realised this site's dedicated to FreeNAS. Oops.

I'll delete this post if it's deemed to be totally off-topic (which it is), but I'm not sure if off-topic discussion is totally frowned upon or tolerated in moderation given the wealth of experience that members here likely have and don't mind sharing some of it.

I was looking at using this board to build a server running Windows Server 2019 with RAID for a customer. Alas the Supermicro OS compatibility chart doesn't list MS Server 2019 as tested yet (2016 is). Supermicro Tech support basically turned around and said they haven't tested it yet and have no plans to either. Doesn't instil much confidence.
I'm wondering if I should chance it or go with an Asus P11C-X.

Apologies in advance if I've broken any written/unwritten rules.

 

[Ericloewe]

Don't worry, we like to help out even when it's not FreeNAS. It's typically easy when it comes to hardware, because what works for FreeNAS tends to work for pretty much any relevant OS out there.

Fundamentally, there's nothing on an X11SCM-F that Windows Server 2019 would have any trouble with. Everything is extremely industry-standard - ASpeed BMC including VGA, Intel I210 NICs, Intel CFL platform and that's the extent of things.

 

[cb27]

Thank you, that's very helpful and reassuring. I suppose I could always get it and swap for the Asus in the unlikely event things don't work out. The silver lining on this whole COVID-19 lockdown is they're not very busy at the moment, so could theoretically tolerate a delay if it arose.

I didn't realise they come with VGA onboard. I was set to go for a G suffix Xeon to provide gfx output.

 

[usergiven]

My plan is to get a X11SCH-LN4F and install Proxmox + VMs on a M.2 SSD Mirror and then passtrough the onboard SATA controller to a FreeNAS VM.
Do you know if this is possible with that board? (Is the SATA contollor in its own IOMMU group?)

Thinking about this model, I currently have the X10SL7 which works beautifully on esxi passing through the onboard LSI hba to a Truenas VM. I'm hesitant to switch to any new board essentially rolling the die on being able to pass through the storage controller. Does anyone know if it works as expected?

 

[Ericloewe]

Passing through the SATA controller is very different from doing the same with an LSI SAS controller. The latter should be easy on most systems, the former is a minefield.