Hope you all had a nice Christmas!
So I'm back in the hunt for a different motherboard+cpu+ram setup. Any suggestions that will work with esxi and be micro atx 9.6"?
EDIT:
Thinking this assuming friends budget affords:
Supermicro X11SSL-NF-O
Xeon E3-1220 V6
Samsung Memory - 16GB DDR4-2133 2Rx4 LP ECC
I strongly suggest looking at this board instead:
https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C236_C232/X11SSL-CF.cfm
It's a few bucks more, but it includes the LSI3008 SAS/SATA controller, which usually retails for $40-70 anyway and would take up one of the few slots the board has (limiting future expansion options). If you're planning to run ESXi, this will be a HUGE help - you'll be able to passthrough that controller straight to FreeNAS. Just grab some SAS/SATA breakout cables, and use the shortest cables that will comfortably work with your chassis. Longer cables are just more mess to organize.
My dream board, though, would be this one:
https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C236_C232/X11SSH-CTF.cfm
It's ~ $150 more, but it gets you 2x10Gb interfaces instead of 2x1Gb, and the C236 instead of the C232 chipset, which, if you get the E3-122
5 CPU, will give you access to Intel Quicksync. If you're planning on running Plex with Plex Pass on this thing (within ESXi, not within a jail, so that you can passthrough the Intel video as well), you'll get the option of using hardware transcoding instead of software transcoding, which means you'll be able to transcode and stream high-quality video, or mulitple videos, without running out of CPU power.
Also, the 10GB interfaces really extend the life of this board. 1GB interfaces are the bottleneck for most NAS systems and are getting dated for decent new NAS builds with any substantial throughput. A stand-alone add-on Intel 2-port 10GB NIC with the same x550 chip costs $300+ (almost the price of the whole board!), so this board is actually a really good deal for the money. 10Gb switches are starting to come down in price a bit, FINALLY, and prices will continue to fall. I would plan to keep this board around at LEAST 5-6 years, so keep that in mind.
To illustrate the bottlenecking - my NAS, which is uses unspectacular and aging 3TB WD Red drives, has no SLOG or L2 ARC, has only 12GB of RAM allocated to FreeNAS (netting a ~9GB ARC), and no special tricks or tuning such as jumbo frames, can sustain reads and writes at 250-300 MB/s. I move 20-40GB files to/from the array all the time between the FreeNAS and other VMs through the software-only ESXi switch, which has no speed limitations. My array is about 65% full, by the way, too.