Supermicro X9SCM-F and VMWare thread info

Im running 5.0 P4.

Also today I managed to install another GPU card, RADEON 6450.

I passed it through as well.

Now I have 2 working VM`s each having its own GPU.

The 5450 does not support DXVA.
The 6450 supports DXVA.

I dont hve the restart issue with the new system which is WIN8.

I do have a problem passing a USB controller so I`m using a software based KVM over IP called Input director, it works fine.

One thing I would like to point out.
The 1st post states
USB Controller 2 is the internal and USB controller 1 is external (the ones on the rear I/O)

This is not 100% true.
USB1 hosts the external rear IO port as well as some internal USBs...

This is the correct spec:
USB 1:
* External ports (REAR IO PANEL)
* Internal USB connector 2/3 and 4/5

USB 2:
* Internal USB Type A (USB 11)
* IInternal USB connector 12/13

So to conclude:
USB HOST 1 gives you 6 USB`s to passthrough.
USV HOST 2 gives you 3 USB`s to passthrough but you might not want to pass it since it will probably run your esxi`s host.
 
I dunno I left my ESXI totally unpatched.. but that's the only thing i really see different..
 
Just a few questions...

  1. Has anyone made the upgrade to ESXi 5.1 with their X9SCM-F board? If so, how was the experience and what BIOS version are you running? Any quirks?
  2. I noticed a 2.0b BIOS on SuperMicro's website but didn't see release notes. Any significant fixes?
  3. I've also ordered 4x 8GB of Hynix memory... anyone see issues running with a full 32GB set?

My X9SCM-F-O board with Sandy E3-1230 and 16GB RAM has been running alright on ESXi 5.0. Well, with the exception of having to use my quad-port Intel NIC on the last PCIE slot, and having to RMA my board after a failed BIOS update to 2.0a. It's a temperamental board during changes, hence my inquiries.
 
I am about to start my main storage system build.. Got some help getting the case out of the box(because I had a surgery and apparently I have a leaking pipe ^_^ and almost lost my AIO system).. But I got the drives coming from amazon and newegg with 12x WD REDs.. probably going to do Intel host bus controller with chenbro expander and ZFS.. Forgot to mention its all going into the All in One..
 
Last edited:
@mista_eng:
i'm running esxi 5.1 with latest bios upgrade.
bios: x9scm2.917

only problem i got is that i cant passthrough the usb controller...
 
@nl-darklord

I had problems with everything but base ESXI 5.. it allows me to pass everything(for some reason).. I figured out a way to rig the GPU to =) I'll be posting pictures once I get the part in..
 
My mobo is almost same (X9SCL+-F), and i have problem bypassing USB device (some usb token).
Added USB controller to VM, but there is "no usb devices available" when i trying to add token - this menu is just grayed. Can booting from USB cause this? Or maybe some BIOS settings needed? USB is enabled, BIOS is 2.0a...
 
Only reason I say that is because if its considered a HID device then it will never pass it unless you pass the whole controller
 
http://guardant.com/technologies/hid-mode/

Guardant dongles are able to work on the Windows family of operating systems without Guardant drivers installed. For this you need to initially switch the dongles into the Human Interface Device (HID) mode using the Guardant programming utility.

When connecting a dongle in HID mode to the USB port of a computer, the system will recognize the dongle as a standard HID-compatible device, after which the dongle will be ready to work immediately.

The operating modes of Guardant dongles in HID-mode, and those with a standard driver are identical from the user’s perspective.

It might be turned on
 
Jerky_san said:
http://guardant.com/technologies/hid-mode/

Guardant dongles are able to work on the Windows family of operating systems without Guardant drivers installed. For this you need to initially switch the dongles into the Human Interface Device (HID) mode using the Guardant programming utility.

When connecting a dongle in HID mode to the USB port of a computer, the system will recognize the dongle as a standard HID-compatible device, after which the dongle will be ready to work immediately.

The operating modes of Guardant dongles in HID-mode, and those with a standard driver are identical from the user’s perspective.

It might be turned on
Click to expand...

Found it too. When i get to signing machine i will check in which mode it work. But i'm not sure our devs set it to HID by default, since we use linux with guardant drivers installed in our product... BTW, can plugged HID device in another port (IP-KVM) cause fail on all ports?

UPD: plugged USB WiFi dongle, VMWare sees it. Token clearly works in HID mode. Thanks for help!
 
Last edited:
Alright built my ZFS box into my all in one.. I used an LSI 16 port host bus card.. didn't know the meta data takes so much space though.. have 12 3tb WD Reds with raidz but the meta data takes another 2.8 tera.. Anyways anyone know anything special I'm supposed to do with the Red drives? So far they seem to be working great.. 900 meg writes 1200 meg reads.
 
Heads up all. There's a 2.0b BIOS update that seems to fix the finickiness of this motherboard and SATA Controller cards.
 
The board can be recovered from a bad BIOS flash. The IPMI controller can initiate a recovery flash provided you have a BIOS on a flash drive and plugged in. See the manual. It explains how to do this.

Correct me if I'm wrong.
 
I would like to share my experiences around the X9SCM-iiF and ESXi 5.1

Config:
X9SCM-iiF (the newer incarnation of the X9SCM-F with 2 x Intel 82574 NICs)
Xeon E3-1240 V2
32GB RAM (Kingston KVR16E11K4/32)
3 x IBM M1015 flashed to LSI-SAS9211 IT mode firmware without OptionROM

I had a networking issue on NIC1 when copying large amounts of data over SMB to the X9SCM-iiF system running Openindiana 151a7 as reported in this post:

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1721706

The NIC hangup only happened when the server was the copy target and only on NIC1 not on NIC2.
I had contacted Supermicro and opened a support case but they don't have experience with OpenSolaris and their suggestions to solve the problem were largely focusing on possible problems of the Linux device driver for the network interface.
They provided me the latest release of the Intel 82574 EEPROM firmware but flashing didn't solve the problem.

I had also installed 3 IBM M1015 storage controllers flashed to IT mode in PCIe slots 7, 6 and 5. Running Openindiana 151a7 directly on the X9SCM-iiF did properly show all 3 controllers.
Also ESXi 5.1 did see all 3 controllers and made them available for passthrough.

However, when running Openindiana 151a7 as a guest under ESXi 5.1 it failed to attach the mptsas device driver to the controller in slot 5. The boot error messages were:

"mptsas bad flash signature" and "mptsas chip initialization failed"

which made me first think about a broken controller card or a bad flash. But swapping boards between the slots did result in the same behaviour and it was always the board in slot 5 that was not configured properly. The problem persisted when only passing through one controller as long as it was the one in slot 5. The controllers in slot 7 and 6 worked perfectly well. And all problems were gone when running Openindiana directly on the hardware and not as a guest in ESXi.

Nevertheless I was about to reflash my controllers to include the OptionROM to see if that makes a difference. Because of the "ERROR: Failed to initialize PAL." problem under DOS on the X9SCM-iiF I booted into the UEFI shell to perform the flashing with the sas2flash.efi executable. To my surprise a "sas2flash.efi -listall" did only show 2 of the 3 controllers. Guess which was missing :)

I didn't proceed with the flashing because this clearly indicated to me that there was a fundamental problem with the X9SCM-iiF board and its PCIe slots.

In the meantime I had received the release notes for the latest X9SCM-iiF BIOS version 2.0a from Supermicro support within the context of my NIC support case. The release notes didn't show anything directly related to networking problems, the NIC chip or IPMI but they indicated that this version would solve several PCIe related problems.

So I upgraded the BIOS from version 2.0 to version 2.0a and man what a difference !
All 3 M1015 controllers work flawless and to my surprise also the networking problem is gone.

I'm extremely careful regarding BIOS upgrades and tend to avoid them if possible but this time I wish I had considered this option much earlier since it would have spared me a lot of time and headache.
 
Can someone send them a memo to use physical x16 slots across all slots in the future? I couldn't buy this board because I needed to install my own GPU(s) and didn't want to cut the cards or slots to make it happen.
 
halcyon said:
Can someone send them a memo to use physical x16 slots across all slots in the future? I couldn't buy this board because I needed to install my own GPU(s) and didn't want to cut the cards or slots to make it happen.
Click to expand...


Agreed.. but I did make it work in my case.. I'm almost done.. I mounted my GPU today with a riser card a 8x to 16x cable both I bought from ebay.. Now I just have to route the sas cabless and power cables to make it look pretty and figure out how I'm going to get these 2 hard drives to fit in the case as well..
 
I'd love to see how you've modified your case to make this work, post some pics when you can!
 
Heres what It looks like.. I'll take it out tmrw and take pictures of that as well.. Yes I know the cables are everywhere.. This is a work in progress..

img20121203220632.jpg


img20121203220623.jpg
 
Update on my previous post on first page. X9SCM-F plus esxi 5.0 and LSI 9240-8i.

I had been running fon 10 months on Bios 1.0C

I ran the latest 2.0B bios which recommends running AMI_1.bat, then also running AMI_2.bat

After boot I could not get into LSI 9240-8i WebBIOS at all. It also would not boot into ESXi at all. Just a blank screen with a cursor. I went to downgrade the BIOS but it gave me a serious warning so I don't recommend that.

I called both LSI and Supermicro. Ask for Derek at Supermicro as he is the expert on X9 boards. Derek recommended upgrading the Firmware on the LSI to the latest Oct 2012.

You can put the megacli.exe and LSI rom on the same usb boot drive. After updating the LSI firmware and rebooting I can get into WebBIOS and ESXi 5 loaded straight away.

Keep all the settings to legacy and turn off all UEFI options; keeps things simple.

We will upgrade our hosts to 5.1 soon and I will let you know how it goes. Thanks.
 
I have a X9SCM-0 motherboard, upgraded the BIOS to 2.0b to support my 1230v2 (Ivy Bridge). I have a PERC 5i and it was not detecting in my motherboard at all. The BIOS or initialization never happen. I have to use the 2nd slot from the top because this is in a 1U chassis with a riser card.


Funny thing is, after messing with everything I found if I cleared the CMOS (pull battery, unplug server, put back the battery) and then boot, after hitting F1 to continue it will detect the card. It will persist through a reboot, but if you do a full power off and back on, it won't detect the card again. I have to clear the CMOS all over again.


I noticed some of you have had issues with getting RAID cards detected. Have any of you found a permanent solution? A specific BIOS setting perhaps?
 
Sorry to kick in, but I tried to install ESXi 5.1 on this exact board and same cpu, 16gb of ram. During installation the screen will go black, then system reboots. Anyone got a clue?
 
elec999 said:
Sorry to kick in, but I tried to install ESXi 5.1 on this exact board and same cpu, 16gb of ram. During installation the screen will go black, then system reboots. Anyone got a clue?
Click to expand...

I have been able to install without issue to this board. Have you tried updating to the latest BIOS (2.0b) and IPMI? Also, check your installation media and memory.
 
REDYOUCH said:
I have been able to install without issue to this board. Have you tried updating to the latest BIOS (2.0b) and IPMI? Also, check your installation media and memory.
Click to expand...

Ram seems very good. and IPMI and Bios are all upto date. What are you bios settings? I get windows cannot install on this hardware for installation of windows after bios reset.
 
elec999 said:
Ram seems very good. and IPMI and Bios are all upto date. What are you bios settings? I get windows cannot install on this hardware for installation of windows after bios reset.
Click to expand...

Please see below:

1.jpg

2.jpg

3.jpg

4.jpg

5.jpg

6.jpg

7.jpg

8.jpg

9.jpg

0.jpg


Your boot order may be different, as I am booting from iSCSI (no local disks).
 
I have X9SCM-F with LSA 9211-8i HBA Controller. I notice the same issue. Sometime the card cannot be recognized by the motherboard during the boot time. I have to reboot several times to make it work. But the same card works well on different motherboard.
 
Anyone running this board with an i5? The manual says it's unsupported. I'm attempting it now but failing with memory beep codes.

Swapping stuff around now.

Edit : Swapped an Intel G840, and boots now with my Kingston Udimm.

It's on the latest bios, so yep, still no i5 support
 
Last edited:
Who has updated to the latest bios 2.0c? Any problems so far

Updated... : Seems to be alright for now!
 
Last edited:
I love how this thread keeps going.
My X9SCA-f + E3-1270 + 32gb of Kingston ram is a workhorse.
We've made many $ in several industries together.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top