So, you’ve decided to buy a Supermicro X11 Xeon E3 v5/6 board...

[Ericloewe]

I thought about that. So I disabled the VGA, hooked up a monitor, and powered up. No video signal.

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Well, that's to be expected if the whole BMC has been disabled, since it's responsible for graphics adapter duties. It'd be interesting to see what "BMC" off and "VGA" on does to IPMI, fan control and stuff like that.

 

[Cornstick]

I just got off the phone with Terrace at Supermicro. He is one of the engineers for the X11 motherboards and he said that shouldn't happen. He ask if I could try installing the graphics card without disabling the onboard VGA and see if the BMC functions. But I think at this point I'll let him do the testing since its taken much longer than expected to get my system running. He also said we should be able to log into the IPMI and manually change the setting for the fans.

I'm sure the latter is true but it doesn't explain why it's happening in the first place.

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[Florent R]

I asked SM exactly that! but never got an answer from them. I think (but this is my assumption) that the ASPEED is only used for the IMPI and doesn't do anything for displaying on the VGA port BUT i am not sure and i love to hear the anwser to this question.

So I asked someone at SM this very question for the X11SSM-F, and the answer I got was: "There is no need to install a PCI-e Video card, nor to use a processor with integrated graphics to get the video". i.e. you can simply drop a processor without integrated graphics, and the Aspeed AST2400 BMC will drive the VGA port.

 

[Cornstick]

The ASPEED chip DOES drive the VGA port. It has 16MB of dedicated DRAM. I'm using the Xeon 1230 which DOESN'T have integrated graphics and the port drives my 1080 monitor just fine.

In fact, I didn't even know what IPMI was before I bought this motherboard. Now I don't know how I lived without it! I use the remote desktop of the ASPEED chip for everything! It's Java based but works pretty well.

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[RichTJ99]

So i am finally getting around to getting my X11SSL-CF-O working with freenas. When I boot up i get an alert that I am on firmware 10 & need to be on firmware 12. During boot I can see from the bios that I am in IR mode. I am able to setup a raidz with the 4 connected disks.

When putty into freenas as root & type 'sas2flash' it says nothing is found.

Code:

sas2flash
LSI Corporation SAS2 Flash Utility
Version 16.00.00.00 (2013.03.01)
Copyright (c) 2008-2013 LSI Corporation. All rights reserved

        No LSI SAS adapters found! Limited Command Set Available!
        Finished Processing Commands Successfully.
        Exiting SAS2Flash.

Yet it can see the firmware is out of date and it sees the connected disks.

Any suggestions on how to make this work? I have the Sas3008 option.

 

[Ericloewe]

So i am finally getting around to getting my X11SSL-CF-O working with freenas. When I boot up i get an alert that I am on firmware 10 & need to be on firmware 12. During boot I can see from the bios that I am in IR mode. I am able to setup a raidz with the 4 connected disks.

When putty into freenas as root & type 'sas2flash' it says nothing is found.

Code:

sas2flash
LSI Corporation SAS2 Flash Utility
Version 16.00.00.00 (2013.03.01)
Copyright (c) 2008-2013 LSI Corporation. All rights reserved

        No LSI SAS adapters found! Limited Command Set Available!
        Finished Processing Commands Successfully.
        Exiting SAS2Flash.

Yet it can see the firmware is out of date and it sees the connected disks.

Any suggestions on how to make this work? I have the Sas3008 option.

That's because sas2flash only works with SAS2 controllers. You want sas3flash.

 

[ioquatix]

So, there is a broken memory stick, so we are stuck with 48GB instead of the 64GB.

For your interest's here is our config:

MB: Supermicro X11SSH-CTF
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1245 V5 (3.5ghz)
Memory: 4x Kingston 16GB ECC (KVR21E15D8/16)
HDD: to be determined likely 8x4TB something :)


Just installed FreeNAS-9.10-STABLE-201604111739 (896cc83) and the 10GBit nics work like charm :) Now doing some speed tests to look at the performance, but i have a no other system with 10GBit nic's.....

What enclosure did you put this in? Can you show some photos :)

 

[Ericloewe]

Ericloewe updated So, you’ve decided to buy a Supermicro X11 board... with a new update entry:

SAS3 updates

Some notices about SAS3 not being mature had been lurking in the document for too long. They were removed, as SAS3 is reliable enough these days.

Also fixed several instances of "LSI SAS 3008". The correct version is "LSI SAS3008", without a second space.

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[Pheran]

There's still a parenthetical "no driver support" for the X550 in the X11SSH-CTF section.

 

[Ericloewe]

Damn it. Thanks for the tip.

 

[Ericloewe]

Ericloewe updated So, you’ve decided to buy a Supermicro X11 board... with a new update entry:

10GbE updates

Much like SAS3, the 10GbE solution used by the X11SSH-CTF is considered reliable these days, so the old warning has been removed.

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[RichTJ99]

Hi - I have a Supermicro X11 mobo. I added a Radeon GPU & now I am having IPMI issues.

Error message:
IKVM doesnt support add-on VGA Device. Please change the Dsub connector to the addon VGA device.

Ideally I would want to have the IGPU display the esxi screen & passthrough the Radeon card to a particular VM.

Any ideas on how to deal with it or is that just how it is?

Thanks, Rich

 

[Ericloewe]

Where does the error show up?

 

[RichTJ99]

I have a monitor plugged into the on board VGA. So it shows up on both the on board VGA and the IPMI app (java one).

Both say (in red) IKVM doesnt support add-on VGA Device. Please change the Dsub connector to the addon VGA device.

 

[Ericloewe]

There might be an option to use a specific graphics controller for video in the BIOS, which would need to be set anyway if the card was going to be passed through to a VM.

 

[plutoz]

Very useful information in this thread, however I'm still not clear on a couple things. If I want to use the Xeon E3-12x5 (SuperMicro says it is compatible with V6 so I would probably buy that) can I use the Intel GPU with the X11SSL-F motherboard or no?

I am actually not looking to run FreeNAS on it, but I need a system that has Intel Quick Sync Video support to run a video management software (Milestone Mobile Server) with hardware accelerated decoding. Requirements are listed here (at the very bottom of the page). The system would be running headless in a datacentre with no monitor connected to it. Supermicro seems like the best choice for something that will be running 24/7. Operating system would be Windows 10.

 

[jlentz3]

Very useful information in this thread, however I'm still not clear on a couple things. If I want to use the Xeon E3-12x5 (SuperMicro says it is compatible with V6 so I would probably buy that) can I use the Intel GPU with the X11SSL-F motherboard or no?

I am actually not looking to run FreeNAS on it, but I need a system that has Intel Quick Sync Video support to run a video management software (Milestone Mobile Server) with hardware accelerated decoding. Requirements are listed here (at the very bottom of the page). The system would be running headless in a datacentre with no monitor connected to it. Supermicro seems like the best choice for something that will be running 24/7. Operating system would be Windows 10.

I'd setup a separate supermicro box for the vms.


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[Rick Arman]

are there any X11s that support upt to 256 gb ECC/Reg RAM, 8 or more SAS3 ports, 10GB NICs AND a dedicated IPMI NIC? I know it will be expensive but since FreeNAS is RAM hungry, I want to future-proof my rig. I'm putting together a spreadsheet of all the parts I need to rebuild my server based on the info from the hardware recommendations pdf and the jock pdf.

 

[Ericloewe]

are there any X11s that support upt to 256 gb ECC/Reg RAM

Not LGA1151. For that, you need Xeon E5 or the new, convoluted line of processors.

 

[Ericloewe]

Ericloewe updated So, you’ve decided to buy a Supermicro X11 board... with a new update entry:

Minor tweaks

Tweaked some references to the SAS3008 controller, to clarify its capabilities. Also tweaked some old references to drivers, now that everything is mature.

Read the rest of this update entry...