[OmniOS-discuss] Experiences with HP Micro Server Gen8

[Jarrad Piper]

Hi All,

I missed out on the discussion Re. the HP Gen8 Microserver last month but
thought I'd put my two cent's on where it is at currently in terms of
hardware support as I've been using it for close to a year now as a
Storage/KVM server.

After Initially having no support at all, the Broadcom 5720 onboard NIC's
for a while now has had out of the box support. However the bundled drivers
are very old and have a serious bug in that the NIC will lock up entirely
if you try to create a VNIC. e.g. "dladm create-vnic -l bge0 vnic0" This
may not concern some people but if you wan't to run a Zone or a KVM Virtual
Machine you will need to create a VNIC. This problem only presents when you
are connected to a 1Gbit switch. Other people have exhibited the same
problem in other circumstances but I have only seen this problem occur
creating VNIC's in OmniOS.

One workaround is to boot the machine up on a 100Mbit switch create the
VNIC and then connect the Gigabit switch. A more practical solution is to
turn of auto-negotiation and set the link properties to 100Mbit. e.g.

sudo dladm show-linkprop bge1
sudo dladm set-linkprop -t -p adv_autoneg_cap=0 bge1
sudo dladm set-linkprop -t -p en_1000fdx_cap=0 bge1
sudo dladm set-linkprop -t -p en_1000hdx_cap=0 bge1

The best solution however is to build the latest driver (16.2.2) from
source which is available from Broadcom's website. On OmniOS you will need
to install onbld and the Solaris Studio 12.1 Compiler before building. The
zip file contains a readme.txt on how to compile and update the driver for
OpenSolaris/Solaris11. You will end up with a BRCMbge-S11-i386-16.2.2.pkg
file which you install using "pkgadd -d BRCMbge-S11-i386-16.2.2.pkg". Note:
this is from memory, there may have also been a few tweaks to the Makefile
to get it to compile.

>From what I can gather Illumos cannot include newer versions of the BGE
driver due to Broadcom's license not being compatible with theirs.

The other major problem with the Microserver is the unbearable fan noise
when the drives are configured in AHCI mode (which is what anyone using ZFS
will want). I won't go into it but more information is available here:

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/ProLiant-Servers-Netservers/MicroServer-Gen8-is-noisy/td-p/6171563
http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/6032-g8-microserver-be-aware-of-fan-issue-add-in-cards/

Basically to get it to a bearable level you will need the latest BIOS and a
hacked ILO firmware (see second link) which lowers the heat tolerance.

Oh and I can also confirm that booting from an SD Card is fine, It has been
happily working for almost a year now.

Hope this helps anyone having issues or thinking of purchasing one. Any
other questions let me know.

Jarrad.
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