Tyan S8030GM2NE

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hmw

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Apr 29, 2019
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I raised a support ticket with Tyan about the BIOS v3.01 issue and they said 'We do not support ESXi 7.0 unfortunately'

:eek:

Well I guess that's that ...
 

TXAG26

Active Member
Aug 2, 2016
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Wow, that’s a bizarre answer! Good luck Tyan, didn’t realize they were Windows and Linux exclusive.
 

hmw

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Apr 29, 2019
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Wow, that’s a bizarre answer! Good luck Tyan, didn’t realize they were Windows and Linux exclusive.
I checked the ESXi hardware compatibility - here's the S80XX series for Tyan


I think my next purchase is going to be a SuperMicro

:eek: Supermicro doesn't have a single motherboard in the compatibility matrix.
 
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whbeers

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Jul 11, 2020
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I also have a support request in with tyan, I'll report back how it goes. I'm expecting a better answer than the equivalent "We do not support uefi boot phases beyond psp post unfortunately" :)

I went ahead and grabbed an asrock romed8-2t board to replace one of them. Not willing to wait for broken bios updates to address the issues I have with it (mainly the "all or nothing" fan control given that one of these machines sits in a small rack behind me in my home office), and the other tyan board can go in a closet rack.

[re esxi support: I moved to proxmox for homelab stuff and haven't looked back at esxi, given the picky hardware support and generally footgun tendencies of vmware/vsan when you only have a few nodes]
 
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jpmomo

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Aug 12, 2018
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I am running esxi 7 on the same board without issue (although I did not update the bios!) This includes using multiple pcie 4.0 x16 nics which was the main purpose for getting one of these boards. I used several different cpu coolers and do not have any noise issues even when stress testing with proprietary sw. I also have a couple of asrock rack mb and supermicro all with pcie 4.0 support. I like the tyan the best so far although the supermicro is a unique ff (smaller than atx and uatx but slightly longer than a mini itx) that I am using in a custom case.
 

diogin

Member
Mar 28, 2018
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Beijing, China
loaded centos on a pcie 3.0 m.2 and left the pcie 4.0 m.2 (with vmware on it) in the second slot. the good news is that it looks like the m.2 slots support pcie 4.0:

View attachment 14394


I really haven't found anything wrong with this board at least for my weird use case!
I searched twitter and found a reply from Tyan Computer (@tyan): It said "S8030 only supports M.2 PCIE3.0".
What a bad news and I don't know why.
 

jpmomo

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Aug 12, 2018
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I did confirm in a previous post. Run the cmd lspci - vv and check the lnkcap And lnksta.
 
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diogin

Member
Mar 28, 2018
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Beijing, China
The Tyan FRU-CS-1230/Slim SAS 8i to 2* U.2 (NVMe) cable is now available from retail (e.g. Acme Micro), the price is a steep $75. With shipping and taxes, it's an eye watering $95 :eek:

Update: Purchased one and here's the pic. It comes with a Molex connector for power and not the usual SATA power connector (Enterprise NVMe drives will take 3.3v and 12v). Seems high quality and right now I'm looking for some refurb/second hand NVMe drives to test this out with.


View attachment 15318
I have bought a similar cable with SATA power from taobao.com, with a price about $30 (with shipping fee, I'm in China), and it works well for me.
1.png
2.png
 
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Culbrelai

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Jan 2, 2021
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This post is super interesting to me, I also want to build a dual purpose NAS server+gaming rig (not enough space for seperate builds unfortunately)

How is the gaming performance on the EPYC? For me it's either an Epyc build or two Intel Platinum 8256's.
 
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diogin

Member
Mar 28, 2018
55
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Beijing, China
Has anybody tested the PCIE 4.0 support of this board?
I searched the micro chips on the board and didn't find any PCIE redriver/retimer on it. This means that the board may has no full PCIE 4.0 support on all slots (PCIE 4.0 slots longer than 5 inchs from CPU should deploy a redriver/retimer to ensure the signal quality).
I inserted a PM9A1 into M.2_0 and found a WHEA error in Windows system log indicating serious PCIE error, while M.2_1 worked well.
This may be the cause that the board has no full PCIE 4.0 support.


Update: The board DOES support PCIE 4.0. The WHEA errors are caused by Samsung PM9A1 PCIE 4.0x4 SSD, it is not compatible with this board.
 
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hmw

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Apr 29, 2019
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Updated IPMI - best done via the OOB update scripts from a separate computer. Takes a long time to apply AND a longer time to boot back into IPMI. Note that this does NOT affect your normal operation. My ESXi was running fine during the update and the VMs were continuously reachable.

I suspect there will be a BIOS update soon with Milan support, so good to have the latest IPMI version
 

diogin

Member
Mar 28, 2018
55
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Beijing, China
NOTICE: This board is NOT compatible with Samsung PM9A1 PCIE 4.0x4 SSD. The PCIE 4.0 interface of this SSD always report WHEA errors, and currently there is no way to resolve this incompatibility issue.

WD SN850 PCIE 4.0x4 SSD works with no problem.
 

diogin

Member
Mar 28, 2018
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Beijing, China
NOTICE: Current BIOS v1.01 doesn't support following options:

* Fixed SOC Pstate
* DF Cstates

While Supermicro H11SSL series support them. This means you CANNOT fix Infinity Fabric frequency (1467MHz for 7502P for example), causing a performance drop under some scenerio. I've contacted Tyan support and am waiting for their response to add these two options in the next version of BIOS.
 

whbeers

Member
Jul 11, 2020
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Noticed this in the 3.00 BMC firmware notes and got hopeful.
3. Fix issue that failed to update BIOS FW via BMC Web UI
Updated BMC on one of my boards then tried to update to bios v1.01, same brokenness as earlier, boot hangs at post code "BAAD"

My response from Tyan support back then was "we cannot reproduce this in our lab". Flashing back to v1.00 bios keeps these running for the time being, but I'm curious if anyone else successfully updated to bios v1.01?


Separately, I ended up stuffing these tyan boards into 1U chassis' that previously had water-cooled Ciara xeon boards inside. I used a Dynatron L18 AIO waterblock [edit: important - change bios fan control setting to "Full speed"] to keep the cpu cool and quiet and swapped in an FSP PSU. I've improvised a 1U panel with crudely cut polyethylene sheets, but would appreciate a pointer to a proper 1U rear panel insert for this board.
 
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hmw

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Apr 29, 2019
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Updated BIOS to v3.01 and sat down to debug the disappearing NIC issue under VMware ESXi. Confirmed that both 7.0 and 7.0U2 show the same symptoms. Turns out that for some reason when PCIe Compliance is enabled in the BIOS it kicks out all other add in cards. And when IOMMU is set to enabled (AUTO won’t work) and ACS / ARI are set to enabled - for some reason one of the onboard NICs gets tagged as passthrough in ESXi. Super strange.

But got into the ESXi console, disabled passthrough for the onboard NIC, rebooted ESXi - and managed to get everything working, along with a nice performance boost for EPYC when using 7.0U2
 
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