Intel Xeon D-1500 Series Discussion

[jasonlitka]

Make sure to uncheck preserve settings. Working fine here. You can tell it did something as the ranges in IPMI view have changed. Using version 2.14.

That's the version I installed. I did tell it to preserve though so I'll try resetting the one box that has the warning.

Oh, and FYI, still no 10Gbe NICs under vSphere 6.0U1. I haven't put any more time into getting the newer drivers to compile and given that I now have a daughter (8 days old) I'm not likely to have the brain power to get it going, even though I do have the downtime since I took a couple weeks off work.

 

[pgh5278]

Good Evening Patrick, using your crystal ball, what is the latest forecast of when matx 1540/20 boards or with SFP+ will be appearing with multiple slots in the retail distribution system for us mere mortals to purchase. Should we be thinking Christmas Fairy or October?
Thank You for your updates.

 

[Patrick]

@pgh5278 I still do not have one in the lab.

Facebook has been eating tons of the chips. They are using a Mellanox NIC too.

 

[Davewolfs]

Do the ASRack boards work just fine with ESXi or are there compatibility issues?

 

[cheezehead]

Do the ASRack boards work just fine with ESXi or are there compatibility issues?

Do you have one? Last checked they were vaporware.

 

[Davewolfs]

Do you have one? Last checked they were vaporware.

I meant in general in case they ever do show up.

 

[cheezehead]

I meant in general in case they ever do show up.

likely they would work, but until someone has one it will be hard to know.

 

[Diverge]

There's a new bios for the supermicro X10SDV series that is supposed to make M.2 SSDs bootable (specifically samsung SM951, and likely XP941). They just emailed me about it months after my initial email about there being a bug with it. I guess that's better than never emailing me.

 

[acmcool]

Do you have one? Last checked they were vaporware.

I just gave up on Xeon D due to this...

 

[Continuum]

I just gave up on Xeon D due to this...

@acmcool. I'm finding myself in a similar situation of waiting for an matx d-1540 motherboard. What motherboard and processor did you settle on instead? (I'm currently doing mental gymnastics evaluating if a supermicro x10sdv board would suffice.)

 

[acmcool]

@acmcool. I'm finding myself in a similar situation of waiting for an matx d-1540 motherboard. What motherboard and processor did you settle on instead? (I'm currently doing mental gymnastics evaluating if a supermicro x10sdv board would suffice.)

I got pair C1 stepping 2683 V3's spicy's and pair C1 stepping 2695 V3's spicy's...

 

[pgh5278]

@pgh5278 I still do not have one in the lab.

Facebook has been eating tons of the chips. They are using a Mellanox NIC too.

Patrick, Thanks for the Update.

Cheers Peter

 

[Continuum]

I got pair C1 stepping 2683 V3's spicy's and pair C1 stepping 2695 V3's spicy's...

Thanks @acmcool. Very helpful.

 

[wago]

Hey Folks ~

Just getting going on a SM X10SDV-8C-TLN4F running CentOS6 (upgrading from an older Core i3 machine). Love it so far; it's a huge performance upgrade, and very frugal on power. However, having a couple problems with the 10Gb NIC, hoping someone here has a pointer.

Problem 1: I'm linking to an HP 1950-24G-2SFP+-2XGT-PoE+ switch, which supports 2@ 10GBaseT and 2@ SFP+ 10Gb ports (plus 24@ 1Gb PoE+). It's a nice box, power draw is pretty low even when running PoE ports. However, the 10Gb link is really intermittent. On reboot, it normally comes up as 1Gb. If I unplug/replug the cable, it'll sometimes link at 10Gb, other times at 1Gb. I've tried a different cable (both Cat6a and Cat7) without luck. No patch panels or anything else, just a short cable from the server to the switch. Has anyone else tried this combination and/or had problems linking at 10Gb? Everything is latest firmware and drivers, but still no luck.

Problem 2: I'm running a pfSense firewall in a VM. For the external interface, I've VT-d device assigned the 1Gb NIC to the pfSense VM so that the traffic flows directly into the firewall without any local bridging or link sharing (seemed most secure this way). However, for the internal interface, I'd like to share the 10Gb port with the parent OS and other VMs on the machine. I should be able to do this using SR-IOV using the max_vfs= parameter to the ixgbe driver (and specifying intel_iommu=on in the kernel cmdline). When I do all this, the driver refuses to create virtual functions, giving me the error "ixgbe: 0000:03:00.0: ixgbe_check_options: IOV is not supported on this hardware. Disabling IOV." Has anyone seen this error before? Is anyone successfully running SR-IOV on the 10Gb NIC?

Kernel is 2.6.32-573, ixgbe driver is 4.1.1/4.1.2 (tried both). BIOS is 1.0b.

Thanks!

 

[miraculix]

Problem 1: I'm linking to an HP 1950-24G-2SFP+-2XGT-PoE+ switch, which supports 2@ 10GBaseT and 2@ SFP+ 10Gb ports (plus 24@ 1Gb PoE+). It's a nice box, power draw is pretty low even when running PoE ports. However, the 10Gb link is really intermittent. On reboot, it normally comes up as 1Gb. If I unplug/replug the cable, it'll sometimes link at 10Gb, other times at 1Gb. I've tried a different cable (both Cat6a and Cat7) without luck. No patch panels or anything else, just a short cable from the server to the switch. Has anyone else tried this combination and/or had problems linking at 10Gb? Everything is latest firmware and drivers, but still no luck.

Not much of an answer but it sounds similar to this Intel Ethernet Drivers and Utilities / Mailing Lists

 

[wago]

Not much of an answer but it sounds similar to this Intel Ethernet Drivers and Utilities / Mailing Lists

Yikes. Hope this isn't a marginal design within the board. Who here has 10Gbase-T reliably working? Which switch & cable are you using?

 

[PnoT]

I'm starting to feel that SFP+ on these boards are a pipe-dream. I need a total of 2 D-1540's for Hyper-V clustering and another D-1520 for either a stand alone backup or SOFS. It's hard to not throw some money on a few 2011 systems and be done with it... grrr

 

[neo]

I'm starting to feel that SFP+ on these boards are a pipe-dream. I need a total of 2 D-1540's for Hyper-V clustering and another D-1520 for either a stand alone backup or SOFS. It's hard to not throw some money on a few 2011 systems and be done with it... grrr

Yep, that's why I went with a 2011 system.

 

[icrf]

Are there any other platforms that even approach the Xeon-D's performance/watt? I love the lower power aspect, as my server is always on, even if it's mostly idle. I get much longer UPS run times with the lower draw, and the whole thing is quieter. I just want more PCIe slots. I'd even give up the 10 GbE for it. The extra expansion slots would give me flexibility to add whatever I wanted.

 

[wago]

Problem 2: I'm running a pfSense firewall in a VM. For the external interface, I've VT-d device assigned the 1Gb NIC to the pfSense VM so that the traffic flows directly into the firewall without any local bridging or link sharing (seemed most secure this way). However, for the internal interface, I'd like to share the 10Gb port with the parent OS and other VMs on the machine. I should be able to do this using SR-IOV using the max_vfs= parameter to the ixgbe driver (and specifying intel_iommu=on in the kernel cmdline). When I do all this, the driver refuses to create virtual functions, giving me the error "ixgbe: 0000:03:00.0: ixgbe_check_options: IOV is not supported on this hardware. Disabling IOV." Has anyone seen this error before? Is anyone successfully running SR-IOV on the 10Gb NIC?

Heard back from SuperMicro support. No SR-IOV for me.

Hi,

SR-IOV function is not supported in X10SDV-8C-TLN4F due to Intel hardware design limitation in current stage.

We are sorry for not able to provide a solution for you at this moment.

Thanks