Supermicro X10SRH-CLN4F BIOS power settings for VMware

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lunadesign

Active Member
Aug 7, 2013
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I've been reading the Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 6.5 guide and they've got a section on Power Management BIOS Settings. In it, they essentially say to switch everything to "OS Controlled Mode" so ESXi controls everything.

There are several settings in the Supermicro BIOS but I'm not sure which one(s) accomplish the VMware guidance.

The BIOS settings are:
1) Power Technology
Choices: Disable, Energy Efficient, Custom
BIOS help text: Enables process power management features.​
2) Energy Performance Tuning
Choices: Enable, Disable
BIOS help text: Selects whether BIOS or OS chooses energy performance bias tuning​
3) Energy Performance BIAS setting
Choices: Performance, Balanced Performance, Balance Power, Power
BIOS help text: Set energy performance bias, which overrides OS setting.​
4) Energy Efficient Turbo
Choices: Enable, Disable
BIOS help text: Energy Efficient Turbo Mode makes sure core frequency only goes up if the result is still energy efficient.​

There are also some additional settings that are available if #1 is set to Custom
5) CPU P State Control
6) CPU HWPM State Control
7) CPU C State Control
8) CPU T State Control

Setting #2 seems most relevant but the choices aren't clear. I'm assuming "Disable" means "OS chooses".

Setting #1 seems somewhat relevant but its not clear to me if setting it to Disable will completely kill the power management features or simply let the OS take control.

Setting #3's help text is concerning in that it says that it overrides the OS setting but doesn't provide an option for not overriding the OS.

FWIW, this is for a small office. I'm looking for a middle ground of good energy efficiency without impacting performance too much. I like the idea of VMware managing things but can't figure out how to implement what they're asking for.
 
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TXAG26

Active Member
Aug 2, 2016
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Bump - I have these same questions about the Supermicro X10 series boards for Xeon E5-2600 v3/v4 systems.
 

sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
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Ive had this bookmarked for a while so wanted to add some notes here for anyone else stumbling in here.
Change the BIOS settings to report C & P-states to the OS, this will expose a set of options in ESXi that allow you to tune and configure powers settings. ESXi is set to balanced by default which limits CPU to about ~80%, setting high performance seems to unlock a slight amount of headroom that resulted in some slight reductions in VM latency for me. Power increase was minimal on my Xeon-D 2100 8C system. I'm still experimenting with some of the advanced options but am interested to hear what others find too.

esxi.local.lan - VMware ESXi 2020-08-21 11-31-38.jpg

adv.jpg
 
Jun 22, 2015
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Does anybody have good settings for this board with low idle power consumption? I don't care that much of peak performance. I am using a E5-2630L
OS is ESXi 7.03
Thanks
 
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