HP t730 Thin Client as an HP Microserver Gen7 Upgrade

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arglebargle

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Jul 15, 2018
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Honestly, I didn't try to install one - not sure where I can go to tap power to run the fan (I don't recall seeing a single molex connector in there), and even if I do, I don't have one handy. That being said, it's not that long. It's just a massive heatsink. I'll toss up some photos of the 7322 versus the 5122.
There's an internal USB port along the front edge of the mainboard, that's where I was going to tap power if I needed it.
 

WANg

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Jun 10, 2018
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Okay, so I've gotten some questions regarding the power consumption with the t730/N40L combination. So over the holidays break I got around to installing a few Etekcity Voltson "smart" outlets (think of them as a cheap PDU with power monitoring functionality), so here's a quick writeup -

So here they are being installed, one for each device. The Powerline AV1200 adapter is connected to a rather scrawny cable that really should be replaced ASAP. I was told that the Voltsons should give a fairly accurate (if slightly high) power reading.


Here's the Voltson smart outlets on the Vesync app (not that great, honestly)



Okay, so to reiterate:
The t730 has 32GB of RAM, a 32GB Sandisk SSD, and a Solarflare SFN-5122F 10GbE adapter running VMWare ESXi 6.5U2.
The N40L has 16GB of RAM, a 16GB Toshiba USB drive for the FreeNAS 11.1U6 boot media, 4 4TB HGST (Western Digital) Deskstar NAS 7200rpm drives running zraid1 (basically RAID5 for zfs) and a SolarFlare Flareon SFN-7322 10GbE adapter.

So what does average idle looks like on the t730 (on the outlet level)? Going by the Voltson, about 30w:



What about the N40L?

About 70-75w:



Keep in mind that the t730 does not expose any power saving features to ESXi 6.5U2, nor is the BIOS setup to save power. The same goes for the N40L and FreeNAS. The t730 is using the N40L as an iSCSI target.

Now, what happens if you load the machine up? (let's say that 6 of the 8 Linux VMs hosted on the t730 ran something like stress -c 6 -hdd 4 to thrash both CPU cycles and HDD utilization)

On the t730, it can get as high as 54w in total:



While on the N40L, the disk thrashing caused the power utilization to spike up to 91w. However, once the load has been taken off, recovery back to 70w doesn't take long at all.
 
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pcpaulh

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Jan 20, 2019
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Hi, I wonder if you can help. I'm trying to install ESXi on a couple of these boxes. The T730 'sees' the 16GB of memory that I have installed but the installer only 'sees' 7GB. Not sure what I'm doing wrong. I've tried 6.5 and 6.7 with the same results. Thank you in advance.
Paul
(I've commented on the 'Getting Started' section as well.)
 

WANg

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Hi, I wonder if you can help. I'm trying to install ESXi on a couple of these boxes. The T730 'sees' the 16GB of memory that I have installed but the installer only 'sees' 7GB. Not sure what I'm doing wrong. I've tried 6.5 and 6.7 with the same results. Thank you in advance.
Paul
(I've commented on the 'Getting Started' section as well.)
Which BIOS version, what's the specs on the RAM, which ISO did you use, and are you booting it in legacy or UEFI? The default ESXi 6.5/6.7 ISO should not boot up on a default config t730 since it's missing the Realtek drivers.
 

pcpaulh

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Jan 20, 2019
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Hi, I've installed a 4 port Intel card and disabled the onboard. Ive tried legacy and UEFI. Bios is
1.04.
RAM is DDR3L-1600 PC3L-12800 CL11 1.35V
ISO is from the VMUG site. I've also tried installing UBUNTU (Live) with the same results. The onboard memory test passes the memory as OK.
Thanks
Paul
 
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WANg

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Hi, I've installed a 4 port Intel card and disabled the onboard. Ive tried legacy and UEFI. Bios is
1.04.
Paul
Upgrade to the latest BIOS (1.12), and before you proceed, see if it shows all 16GB of RAM inside a Linux LiveCD environment on v1.04. If it does, ignore what it says during the initial boot on ESXi. AFAIK the ESXi installer boot instance does not show the same information as the environment that comes up after you install it, so that RAM discrepancy can be safely ignored. That being said, make sure you are on the latest ESXi 6.5/6.7 patch level ISO.
 

pcpaulh

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Jan 20, 2019
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Upgrade to the latest BIOS (1.12), and before you proceed, see if it shows all 16GB of RAM inside a Linux LiveCD environment on v1.04. If it does, ignore what it says during the initial boot on ESXi. AFAIK the ESXi installer boot instance does not show the same information as the environment that comes up after you install it, so that RAM discrepancy can be safely ignored. That being said, make sure you are on the latest ESXi 6.5/6.7 patch level ISO.
OK, will do. Thanks.
 

pcpaulh

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Jan 20, 2019
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Hi, BIOS updated, unfortunately no change. It's odd, because the HP thin client OS is seeing all of the memory. Ubuntu Live only sees one stick (or at least reports 6.7G). If I put an 8G stick and the original 4G it sees 10.8G (assuming it runs in memory so doesn't see all of it?). I thought the sticks I bought were compatible. I've swapped them over with each other so it's not a duff stick. Tried booting both legacy and UEFI modes, same results.
 

WANg

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Jun 10, 2018
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Hi, BIOS updated, unfortunately no change. It's odd, because the HP thin client OS is seeing all of the memory. Ubuntu Live only sees one stick (or at least reports 6.7G). If I put an 8G stick and the original 4G it sees 10.8G (assuming it runs in memory so doesn't see all of it?). I thought the sticks I bought were compatible. I've swapped them over with each other so it's not a duff stick. Tried booting both legacy and UEFI modes, same results.
What type of memory are they? My t730 was originally given a pair of G.Skill Ripjaw F3-1600C9S-8GRSL
8GB DDR3L (1.35/1.5v) modules (1600MHz, 9-9-9-28, single channel per module) until it was bumped up to the Nemix 16GB units.
 

pcpaulh

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Jan 20, 2019
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What type of memory are they? My t730 was originally given a pair of G.Skill Ripjaw F3-1600C9S-8GRSL
8GB DDR3L (1.35/1.5v) modules (1600MHz, 9-9-9-28, single channel per module) until it was bumped up to the Nemix 16GB units.
I don’t have that much info on mine. I’ll see if the MEMtesr app will give me more detail. I’ve just ordered some ‘compatible’ memory from Crucial to see if that fixes the problem. It may explain the random resets on another 730 I bought at the same time. Different memory and the OS did see it all but it would sometimes reset or drop it’s network stack.
 

arglebargle

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Hey, apologies for being a little off topic but I wanted to mention that I've got IOMMU working perfectly on my DFI122-BE now too. It's pretty close to functionally identical to the T730 but with easier access to storage expansion internally. Thanks for posting about these boxes, they're pretty practical little home compute nodes!
 

WANg

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Hey, apologies for being a little off topic but I wanted to mention that I've got IOMMU working perfectly on my DFI122-BE now too. It's pretty close to functionally identical to the T730 but with easier access to storage expansion internally. Thanks for posting about these boxes, they're pretty practical little home compute nodes!
Interesting. Does the IOMMU enabled BIOS add ARICtl support, or it's still 7 devices or below?
 

WANg

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Oh yeah, I should mention that I just upgraded the t730/N40L pair to run multipathed iSCSI off a pair of Mellanox ConnectX3 VPI (MCX354As) on 40GbE ethernet- I deep sixed my SolarFlare SFN5122/7322 Flareon 10GbEs (which worked just fine) and my Mellanox ConnectX2 VPI cards when I realized that the ESXi 6 drivers are...problematic (no support for Ethernet mode in the drivers for 6.5U2). I also found out that FreeNAS 11's version of NFSv4 does not play well with VMWare (it can only do read-only, and NFSv3 is slower than iSCSI, so what's the point). The cards ran cooler and faster, so that's a plus.
 
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arglebargle

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Interesting. Does the IOMMU enabled BIOS add ARICtl support, or it's still 7 devices or below?
ARIFwd isn't available so you're still limited to 8 devices. If you find a <$200 platform that supports ARI let me know, I haven't found anything except Sandy/Ivy Bridge Xeon servers that actually has full support and they're more power hungry than I'd like for 24/7 use.

Oh yeah, I should mention that I just upgraded the t730/N40L pair to run multipathed iSCSI off a pair of Mellanox ConnectX3 VPI (MCX354As) on 40GbE ethernet- I deep sixed my SolarFlare SFN5122/7322 Flareon 10GbEs (which worked just fine) and my Mellanox ConnectX2 VPI cards when I realized that the ESXi 6 drivers are...problematic (no support for Ethernet mode in the drivers for 6.5U2). I also found out that FreeNAS 11's version of NFSv4 does not play well with VMWare (it can only do read-only, and NFSv3 is slower than iSCSI, so what's the point). The cards ran cooler and faster, so that's a plus.
Hey, now we're running almost identical platforms. I have CX3's in all of my machines and I've been really happy with them. Mellanox has first class support on every platform that I've used (even pfSense if you're willing to build the BSD driver and install it yourself.) If you need to active cool one of those cards in a low airflow machine it's also really easy to just screw a fan onto the heatsink with coarse thread machine screws.
 

WANg

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ARIFwd isn't available so you're still limited to 8 devices. If you find a <$200 platform that supports ARI let me know, I haven't found anything except Sandy/Ivy Bridge Xeon servers that actually has full support and they're more power hungry than I'd like for 24/7 use.
Yeah, see, the problem isn't really the hardware per-se as much as the BIOS lacking support for it. Same goes for the Ryzens - I was about to splurge on an X370 Pro based setup with a Ryzen5, until I came across this on Reddit. I am actually tempted to shut the t730 down, pull the BIOS backup out and run it through a UEFI tool to see if there are any interesting features that are not exposed.
 
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arglebargle

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Yeah, see, the problem isn't really the hardware per-se as much as the BIOS lacking support for it. Same goes for the Ryzens - I was about to splurge on an X370 Pro based setup with a Ryzen5, until I came across this on Reddit. I am actually tempted to shut the t730 down, pull the BIOS backup out and run it through a UEFI tool to see if there are any interesting features that are not exposed.
Here's the dump from the most recent T730 firmware, I already had all of the tools handy from patching the firmware for my DFI. I had a quick peek but I don't really know what I'm looking for.

I have recent/patched versions of everything needed to run UBU too, if you'd like copies I can upload the binaries. It took me a bit of googling to hunt down working download links.

Here's a modded Ryzen BIOS that has enabled ARI Forwarding: https://www.overclock.net/forum/11-...-asus-prime-x370-pro-asus-prime-x470-pro.html

If you dump the before and after versions of that BIOS you might be able to figure out how to enable ARI Forwarding on our boards.
 

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Vic J

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Jul 5, 2019
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Hp posted a new bios 1.15

Changelog
ENHANCEMENTS:
- TCG2 module update.


- Fixes system hang on if capture image by ThinUpdate on the unit with fiber card.
- Fixes BCU retry password issue.
 

Vic J

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Jul 5, 2019
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Hello,

Thanks to Wang and others, I bought a brand new T730 to setup as pfsense or untangle in vm, I am new to ESXI, Could someone guide me to beginner guide on ESXI install, I tried google but getting overwhelmed with different results.
 

WANg

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Well, you'll need a custom 6.5/6.7 ISO as the default ESXi ISO does not contain the Realtek NIC drivers embedded on the t730 (unless you bought the Broadcom TG3/Tigon based AT29M2 fiber NIC, in which case it'll work just fine), and something that can make a bootable USB drive out of an ISO.

You'll probably need to grab the Realtek drivers from a site like this, and then download/run the ISO image builder - basically, the strategy here is to add the "community supported" Realtek drivers into the ISO, and disable Secureboot (as it'll kick up the purple screen of death on boot with a custom ESXi ISO) in the t730's BIOS.

After you are done, grab a sufficiently large, sufficiently fast USB thumb drive and something like Rufus/uNetBootin to image in the drive, then see if the machine will boot off it. As for install target, use something like a Sandisk UltraFit USB 3.1 drive, they are cheap even with 64GB capacity, which is good for one of the internal USB ports on the t730.

Oh yeah, just remember that there are no SRIOV support on ESXi for the t730. If you need that for low latency packet flipping for VMs, use Proxmox with the ARIFwd patch instead.
 
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