Thanks for the PM. Asus also sent me the 0501 BIOS and I compared it against yours, it's identical, but unfortunately doesn't fix the VT-x bug. I'm considering buying another motherboard just for the virtualisation support. I've seen several HP and Dell workstation boards on eBay that should be compatible - the downside is I would lose the control of the CPU performance. I had a HP workstation a few years back and their BIOS support for overclocking/underclocking is roughly zero.

The L-series Xeons were for me a natural choice, I didn't want to blow my electricity bill through the roof with the effective consumption of two computers in one. Even four years later, I don't see any Intel solution that gives 8 physical cores for 100 watts of electricity, and even less when underclocked...