Intel EXPX9501AT (XR977) experiences

[mrkrad]

plugged into a hp procurve 2920 and RK375 (broadcom 57710) using 10gbase-T over 50ft of cat6 monoprice crappy cable.

take a second and inspect your card, out of 4 cards, i found physical damage to 3 with a 16x magnifying glass and rma'd them. They would not link up nor flas h but appeared to pass self-tests.

With any used gear, you should do a physical inspection as some people knock caps off or blow them up it seems. Probably some dumbass plugging a phone line into a 10gbe ethernet nic and frying the TX'er

 

[mrkrad]

Was having some issues with my main Win8 setup.
The Hardware change beep became more and more pronounced to a point of becoming a pain.
Only seemed to happen with the XR997 in the machine.
So disabled various devices.
Wasn't until I changed the mouse that all went quiet.

Chucked another mouse in and now I'm laughing.

To celebrate, I've broken the 1GB/s mark in file transfer
Using same 4GB file as above, copied from RAMdisk to RAMdisk

hay dude can you modify win7 and 2008R2 drivers XR997? I am going to do 2012/8 but most of my test gear is 7/2008R2. Did you re-sign these drivers? As in safe for development server use?

i just had a mouse do the usb bee-boop endlessly, i got steelseries intellimouse replacement and its been fine since. old gear sucks.

 

[maxleung]

mrkard, I didn't physically inspect them but I did have them installed previously in my server and PC and they worked fine - with each other. Maybe they have old firmware or perhaps they both had something fried that the newer cards don't like. Oh well, it's not a biggy yet as I don't have enough slots and PCs to try again!

 

[mobilenvidia]

hay dude can you modify win7 and 2008R2 drivers XR997? I am going to do 2012/8 but most of my test gear is 7/2008R2. Did you re-sign these drivers? As in safe for development server use?

i just had a mouse do the usb bee-boop endlessly, i got steelseries intellimouse replacement and its been fine since. old gear sucks.

Resign drivers (insert huge laugh), do you know how much that costs ?

I'll have a look later in week with modding INF for Server 2k8, just far too busy at work, running out of time

I've modified the install file of a certified driver to work with the XR997.
So driver is the same but supports the XR997
But you are using a driver not officially for the XR997

Compatibility
Same (latest) FW both ends, with different controllers just latest on both
LAN settings same at both ends, especially handshaking, jumbo packets etc

I've got 10Gbps with Cat 5e cable (longest tried 3m) so this is not a biggy

 

[mrkrad]

how about for windows 7?? These cards eat far too much cpu for a server. But should work good for daily work plus D2D offsite backups.

I'm just not getting more than 65% utilization where as the solarflare pegs out 10gb about 1/3 way through a standard ATTO benchmark over SMB2.

 

[mobilenvidia]

Only my Laptops are running Win 7, can't really test if my INF mods will work.

 

[mrkrad]

i'd be glad to test! Do you see better performance in linux/esxi ?

 

[mobilenvidia]

i'd be glad to test! Do you see better performance in linux/esxi ?

Never tested with either, only used it with Win <--> Win machines, where no performance gains were seen, just extra features unlocked

 

[mrkrad]

Hmm. That's a good question then. Does Linux/Esxi perform better or worst. How would you setup SRP/iwarp/rdma with esxi ? Is infiniband without IP supported?

 

[ChrisBenn]

So you had an XR997 plugged directly into an Intel X540-T2 or something similar, and it detected and worked fine?

I have a XR997 plugged into a X520-T2 and can confirm it works. (Actually 2 XR997's - one on a Win7x64 box, and one on a Win8 box). The X520-T2 is on a Solaris 11 box.

 

[mrkrad]

They really are all the same core. 82598 and 82599 - Intel just swapped in reduced power PHY in the later models. Really old school technology but simple compared to many CNA's.

Keep in mind 10gbe nic's have various design goals that are different than gigabit

 

[maxleung]

Thanks Chris. I am still at a loss as to why my XR997s refuse to link with my X540-T2s (I have two).