I remember that I had tried pass through , vt-d worked ok with esxi 5.x with X5650
Excellent.
I just received mine yesterday, and apart from a hiccup where I didn't get the riser card I had specicifed (they are hipping it separately now) specified in my order, everything is working well!
VT-d is showing up in the BIOS, so it was probably just a matter of early BIOS revisions not having it implemented yet. (fingers crossed) (Mine cam ewith the June 2011 BIOS on it, will be updating to latest as soon as I get ILO working.
ILO configured nicely using the dedicated management port on the back. I have an IP set up, and it gives me the logon screen remotely. As others have experienced, the default login credentials for ILO aren't working though (presumably because the previous user changed them). I tried resetting them using the il100cfg utility as described below from the old DL180 thread:
In case anyone is wondering how to access the lo100 admin account I tried to reset the password by updating the lo100 firmware and then tried with the Intel ipmitool however both did not work. What I ended up doing was downloading the SmartStart Scripting Toolkit Win32 Edition part 1 which contains the lo100cfg utility. From there I ran lo100cfg.exe -s and had it output the current settings and I saw the following:
<users>
<user id="2" name="ROUSER" privilege_level="operator" />
<user id="3" name="USERID" privilege_level="administrator" />
</users>
I was then able to login with the USERID account using the password "admin".
I ran into trouble though as I only had client versions of Windows to install, as I don't normally run Windows (even my desktop is a linux machine) No love from the lo100cfg utility under Windows 7 Professional. I was able to find an ISO of Windows Server 2008 online. Hopefully it will install in a 30 day trial mode, just like Windows 7 does on the desktop, so I won't need a key, and I can use that to reset the ILO admin account and then wipe the drive and go about installing ESXi.
A quick note for anyone else using one of these, as it might save them a lot of time in trouble shooting: I got stuck for hours with a system that would not boot off of any media. First I tried off of a USB stick. Never booted, just a blinking cursor. Then I tried using a USB DVD drive, again, just a blinking cursor. Then I opened the case and installed a DVD drive direcly using one of the motherboard SATA ports. Still no love, just a blinking cursor. Was tearing my hear out trying to figure out what BIOS setting I must have missed, and wondering if I had wound up with a defective unit until I on a whim, found and disabled the hot plug USB floppy setting, which finally allowed me to boot.
Apparently it creates a fake floppy so that you can hot plug a USB floppy drive for maintenance. Problem was my unit was trying to boot off of this fake floppy at the expense of everything else (and it wasn't apparentl either, as floppy was not listed in the boot order menu in the BIOS). Once I disabled it, everything was good!
Also wasted a shitload of time by accidentally disabling quick boot when I was troubleshooting my boot problems. It is amazing how long it takes to count up to 96GB of RAM
Next step, install Windows 2008 Server (hopefully in trial mode) to reset ILO, then do some baseline temperature testing by loading all the cores with mprime in linux (or prime95 in Windows) so I know where I stand before my fan mod.
Does anyone off hand know what the max temp is of the L5640 CPU's? The desktop LGA1366 chips can go up to 100C - if I recall - but I am not sure if the low power Xeons have a lower limit. It also depends on what the server management firmware thinks is an over temperature condition.
That being said, I should be able to figure out what the stock target temperature is by loading up the cores without any PCIe boards installed, jotting down fan RPM's and core temps as they rise to a stable temp, and then plot temps vs fan RPM's and fit a line to try to see what core temp corresponds to a 100% 14krpm duty cycle, and then set up my fan mod to stay under this temperature (with a little safety margin, of course)
Wish me luck!