if cost is your concern shop around for mobo's on ebay, I heard some r/homelab people getting dual Xeon boards for $200 for stuf like this.
Considering the CPUs are going to be used, most likely very heavily, I'm wanting to go with a new board to minimize potential hardware failures.
EDIT: Hit my post limit for a newbie account T_T
EDIT I've got my MCSE and a couple of other certs along with the Security Clearance from the DoD. In fact I'm currently enrolled in the CEH program offered by the government, but I'm really happy with being a network/systems administrator for a corporation that does contract work with the DoD.
If you go with a Dell workstation board, sure, it'll be much less expensive, but you get so much less out of it.
Greetings fellow worker bee. I used to be HPE as well @nmci , But I switched to a different contractor on base doing more IA.
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nope they where buying some intel boards, EE-ATX too.
it really comes down to money, since I get skimping on 8core CPUs since new ones are 1k+ but $300 savigns comes down to the person.
Can you explain why you don't have the horsepower, the system you have certainly is a beast and can hold 64Gb of RAM. That and 12 logical processors can support a lot of VM's - especially ones that are not really doing much other than being nodes in a network lab.
Assuming you are running Windows have you downloaded the PAL tool, collected a data-collection set and analysed it to see where your system gets bottle-necked? Even if it looks like CPU in task manager it could just be RAM, and then your disk(s) being thrashed which in turn pushes up CPU usage. PAL is available from here: https://pal.codeplex.com/
Also, if you are new to virtualization then you do understand that you can run more VM's than you have physical cores and use your hyper-visor to dynamically manage how much CPU and Memory resource each VM can use? What Hyper-visor are you using, if it's just virtual-box it is time to move on to something else, Proxmox, ESXi or Hyper-V.
I'd hate for you to sell components at a loss, and have the hassle of a rebuild when spending money on some well planned upgrades could give you what you really need, and keep those newer and IMO better components. You do realise that a 5820k overclocked wouldn't be far off the multi-threaded performance as a 2 x E5 2670s?
When running VM's deal with the bottlenecks in this order;
1) Storage performance - Set up some SSD's in RAID 10 if you need to.
2) RAM - don't thin provision each VM's memory allocation, or set a reasonable minimum.
3) CPU - depending on your hyper-visor you can set priority/clock-speed and number of cores.
I've seen production hyper-visor hosts with less CPU grunt that your machine, but a whole shit load more RAM host 30+ production servers. Provided the VM's are never all busy at the same time you stretch CPU resources pretty thinly and get away with it.
Good luck, what ever you do you'll have fun and learn loads :-)