`<div dir="ltr">Hi All,<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div><div>sudo dladm show-linkprop bge1</div><div>sudo dladm set-linkprop -t -p adv_autoneg_cap=0 bge1</div><div>sudo dladm set-linkprop -t -p en_1000fdx_cap=0 bge1</div><div>sudo dladm set-linkprop -t -p en_1000hdx_cap=0 bge1</div>
</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>From what I can gather Illumos cannot include newer versions of the BGE driver due to Broadcom's license not being compatible with theirs.</div><div><br></div><div>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:</div>
<div><br></div><div><a href="http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/ProLiant-Servers-Netservers/MicroServer-Gen8-is-noisy/td-p/6171563">http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/ProLiant-Servers-Netservers/MicroServer-Gen8-is-noisy/td-p/6171563</a></div>
<div><a href="http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/6032-g8-microserver-be-aware-of-fan-issue-add-in-cards/">http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/6032-g8-microserver-be-aware-of-fan-issue-add-in-cards/</a><br>
</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>Oh and I can also confirm that booting from an SD Card is fine, It has been happily working for almost a year now.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Hope this helps anyone having issues or thinking of purchasing one. Any other questions let me know.</div><div><br></div><div>Jarrad.</div></div>
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