Supermicro X9DRD 1U chassis 126 USD

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u238

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Aug 11, 2018
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I've updated SM boards in the past so not concerned on how difficult, just whether some else who had bought one of these custom (and they are custom) boards have upgraded the BIOS with the stock BIOS updates for meltdown/spectre.
Just wanted to let you know that the regular bios update works fine on these.
 

u238

Member
Aug 11, 2018
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If anyone was curious, the rails for these are really nice. They snap into the rack in about 5 seconds from the front and also lock open with nice pull tabs to unlock. They have quite a few slots, and can probably be modified to fit a lot of different chassis. I know for sure that they match up with 2 of the 3 holes in a supermicro 512 chassis.
 

Jon Yonke

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Jan 7, 2016
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Not sure if this has been posted yet, but I just picked up 3 of these and found out that even after resetting IMPI to factory defaults with the ipmicfg tool the default username and pass for it is root/root.

I was really scratching my head as to why the very well known ADMIN/ADMIN was not working, haha. Hopefully saves someone a bit of time.
 

Jon Yonke

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Jan 7, 2016
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Anyone other than burtonmadness running ESXi? He confirmed he had not found a fix for the processor pattern errors. Anyone have any potential insight?

 

Mark M.

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Feb 19, 2019
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Anyone other than burtonmadness running ESXi? He confirmed he had not found a fix for the processor pattern errors. Anyone have any potential insight?
I'm seriously contemplating picking up a few of these myself for VMWare, but this issue is giving me some pause. I'll see if I can do some research and find out some details. Other than these errors being reported in the hardware health alerts, is ESXi 6.7U1 running stable?
 

Jon Yonke

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Jan 7, 2016
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I'm seriously contemplating picking up a few of these myself for VMWare, but this issue is giving me some pause. I'll see if I can do some research and find out some details. Other than these errors being reported in the hardware health alerts, is ESXi 6.7U1 running stable?
Yeah no issues with it running, just annoying to see false alerts.

My best guess is this MB was purpose built for these, and the BMC firmware still has some left over bits for pieces that were removed. I guess I do not pop into vcenter that often once everything is up and going, so I can live with it.

I was really surprised how quiet these things are for being a 1U chassis. I would not want to sit net to one long term, but I would not call them screamers, and do just fine tucked away in the rack under the stairs in the basement.
 

Mark M.

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Feb 19, 2019
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@Jon Yonke thanks for the info and update. I'll go ahead and pull the trigger on these. I'm getting the listing with 64GB, and they gave me a quote with the riser and rack rails for $420/ea for 5. I may counter with a best offer to see if I can get that down just a touch.

I'll report back if I am able to tinker with the BMC and get it straightened out -- I share your annoyance about false alerts.
 

Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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Mine arrived today. Looks brand new. Dressed it out and loaded 2012 R2. No issues at all. I did have to add a user to IPMI in order to get in. The default was root and the password was ?. I reset the BMC back to factory default but it did not reset the default account back to ADMIN / ADMIN like the instructions said it would and I can't delete the root account. May have to live with it, no big deal. I already had the CPUs and memory. I did order the rails, HD cage and the riser. And like somebody else mentioned, it's not as loud as you'd expect a 1u to be. It's sitting at the top of the rack close to an LB6M and it can't be heard over the noise of the switch.
 

arglebargle

H̸̖̅ȩ̸̐l̷̦͋l̴̰̈ỏ̶̱ ̸̢͋W̵͖̌ò̴͚r̴͇̀l̵̼͗d̷͕̈
Jul 15, 2018
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Would anyone who has one of these mind reporting idle power draw with dual CPUs installed? I'd like to compare to my 1u HP gen8.
 

Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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Got something funky going on with the expansion slot.

Mellanox ConnectX 3 caused the computer to lock up at the login screen. Required a hard reset.

Chelsio 310 did the same monkeying around with the BIOS got me past the login screen but the the computer went off into lala land when installing the driver. Required a hard reset to recover.

Mellanox ConnectX 2 worked without issues. Driver installed automatically and it works without issues.

Anybody have any ideas what might be going on her?

TIA
 

arglebargle

H̸̖̅ȩ̸̐l̷̦͋l̴̰̈ỏ̶̱ ̸̢͋W̵͖̌ò̴͚r̴͇̀l̵̼͗d̷͕̈
Jul 15, 2018
657
244
43
Got something funky going on with the expansion slot.

Mellanox ConnectX 3 caused the computer to lock up at the login screen. Required a hard reset.

Chelsio 310 did the same monkeying around with the BIOS got me past the login screen but the the computer went off into lala land when installing the driver. Required a hard reset to recover.

Mellanox ConnectX 2 worked without issues. Driver installed automatically and it works without issues.

Anybody have any ideas what might be going on her?

TIA
I had a similar issue in my Haswell desktop. Try masking the i2c smbus pins on the card and see if it boots.

Here: Yannick's Tech Blog: Modding a Dell Perc 6 / Dell H310 / Dell H710 (other LSI 1078 or 9223-8i based) SAS Raidcontroller
 
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Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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Thanks. Noted for future reference. The ConnectX2 is working so I'll leave it be for now. I have a Solarflare 10G NIC on the way. I'll give it try and tape the pins if need be.
 

arglebargle

H̸̖̅ȩ̸̐l̷̦͋l̴̰̈ỏ̶̱ ̸̢͋W̵͖̌ò̴͚r̴͇̀l̵̼͗d̷͕̈
Jul 15, 2018
657
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Thanks. Noted for future reference. The ConnectX2 is working so I'll leave it be for now. I have a Solarflare 10G NIC on the way. I'll give it try and tape the pins if need be.
Yeah, I had exactly the same thing happen with my Haswell machine -- the CX2 worked beautifully but plugging the CX3 in just caused the machine to crash on boot endlessly. Masking the smbus pins fixed it right up.

I've had this happen before too, I think with an nvidia 870 in my old i5 2500k workstation. Masking the same pins solved my boot issues there as well.
 

Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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The Solarflare NIC arrived and it works without any issues so I guess just some cards have this problem.

I put the ConnectX3 in a Supermicro X9SCM-F and it worked without issues so on second thought it must be certain combination of cards and MB's.