E3 Xeon Motherboard with Transcoding and IPMI?

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dexvx

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Mar 6, 2014
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At home I have a combo storage/transcode (Emby)/VM server running a Haswell E3 Xeon on a Supermicro X10 something. It works great... except that it automatically disables the iGPU. I'm still using Windows Server 2012 R2 with a LSI 9261-8i RAID-6 with 8 drives in RAID-6. With my current data hoarding, I'll be needing to expand by early next year.

Now that Emby has somewhat mature hardware transcode support, I figure it might be a good time to upgrade and explore software RAID options, either mdadm or Storage Spaces. But first, I would need a board that has ECC, IPMI, and can expose the iGPU for transcode. Is such a thing out there?
 

i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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What dou you mean with "can expose the igpu for transcode"?
(I'm not up to date with the hardware encoding/transcoding and the last time I looked for that kind of stuff in mid 2015, x264 on cpus was faster and had the better results)
 

K D

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Dec 24, 2016
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In the SuperMicro boards with IPMI support, the remote KVM is directly integrated with the aspeed video controller. There is a jumper (JPG1 in X11SSH-CTF) that you need to set to disable the onboard video . But that would mean that you will lose iKVM functionality.
 

msg7086

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May 2, 2017
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I remembered that you need to actually plug a device on to iGPU output to activate its transcoding functionality. People used to use a fake monitor adapter to do that. Make sure you do have on board VGA/whatever port and you plug something in.
 

dexvx

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Mar 6, 2014
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It would seem that all the Supermicro X11 (Xeon E3 v5/v6) boards have only one VGA, connected to the Aspeed VGA controller.

My X10 (Xeon E3 v3/v4) board just disables the iGPU. I see no setting in BIOS to enable it. Therefore the OS cannot load any drivers on it. As far as why transcode? Well it is loads more efficient than CPU x264/x265 at the moment. With 1x high bit rate (30+ Mbps) 1080p x264 transcode, I'm looking at about 30%+ average CPU utilization across all cores.
 

Stephan

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Apr 21, 2017
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On Linux with Intel iGPU you could try i915.enable_gvt=true as a command-line parameter to enable GVT-g, see Intel® Graphics Virtualization Technology (Intel® GVT) for a description and GVTg_Setup_Guide · 01org/gvt-linux Wiki · GitHub for a howto. This would enable KVM/Xen virtual guests to access the GPU and allow hardware-assisted transcoding.

Your Aspeed is a PCIe x1 video card and that is one reason why the iGPU will get disabled. On Linux the i915 driver will enumerate all and any displays and if it finds none, it will disable internal power wells to save power. On Windows I imagine one needs to attach a fake monitor dongle otherwise the driver isn't loaded or disabled and you can't use the iGPU then.

Anyhow, very experimental and prepare for some head scratching.
 

dexvx

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Mar 6, 2014
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All of the Xeon E3 v5/v6 boards I'm seeing only have one VGA out, and thats from the Aspeed controller. Intel has whitepapers detailing how awesome their Xeon E3's are at transcoding. But there are no motherboards!
 

K D

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Dec 24, 2016
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Just tested this out on an X1SSH-CTF board and E3-1275 v6 CPU with intel P630 graphics.
  1. Enabled Passthrough of the Intel Graphics Adapter
  2. Added PCI device to Windows 10 VM
  3. Downloaded and installed intel drivers from Download Intel® Graphics Driver for Windows* [15.45]
  4. Had an issue where mouse was not responsive. Managed to get into display settings and it had displays setup as extended desktop. Changed it to display on monitor 1 alone.
  5. Checked Handbrake and QuickSync settings were enabled. (The checkboxes were disabled earlier)
2017-06-27 13_46_02-vSphere Web Client.png hera.dnet.kd11.net-2017-06-27-13-44-52.png hera.dnet.kd11.net-2017-06-27-13-44-33.png
 
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K D

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Didn't see a difference in my test file between the 2.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

msg7086

Active Member
May 2, 2017
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According to Wikipedia, quicksync is as good as x264 superfast preset.

In other words, bad but not too terrible; acceptable.