[Notes about Supermicro X11SCA-F]

I don't use Unraid, but I have been following this thread and thought I would share my experience of the X11SCA-F with ESXi 7.

After a lot of tinkering, I have managed concurrent use of iKVM and the passthrough of onboard iGPU and 2x graphics cards (RTX 4000 & T1000).

 

BIOS 1.2 (X11SCA9.C05):

Load Optimised Defaults

Primary Display = PCI
Primary PEG = Slot 4 (RTX 4000)
Primary PCI = Onboard
Internal Graphics = Enabled

>then last, set the following:
Option ROM, Video = UEFI

save & reset

server starts to POST and before completing, it reboots once, then boots fully into ESXi and is fine after

I needed to activate the passthrough of the 'Processor Gaussian Mixture Model' PCI device to allow the 2nd GPU to remain Active, which was odd, but not a problem. All persists on reboot. IPMI version 01.73.13.

 

I had this working a year ago with a Quadro P4000 and P620, but in an attempt to resolve an NVMe issue, I removed the GPUs, upgraded the BIOS to the current 1.6a and tried several other changes, but was not successful. I then installed my newer GPUs ...and entered the world blank screens and CMOS resets noted by others. With BIOS 1.6a, I had managed to get iKVM, iGPU and a single GPU to work using the settings above, but keeping the Video Option ROM = Legacy. For 2 GPUs I needed to revert to my last known working BIOS 1.2. I have a few BIOS files between 1.2 and 1.6a, so I could try these, but as it works now, I probably won't bother.

 

X11SCA-F PCI slots:

Slot 7: Broadcom 9400-16i (16x HDD) - Passthrough to OmniOS

Slot 6: AOC-SHG3-4M2P (3x M.2-NVMe & 1x M.2-PCIe) - Local

Slot 5: USB-C from motherboard header

Slot 4: Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 - Passthrough to Win VM (disable before VM shutdown)

Slot 3: gap

Slot 2: Nvidia T1000 - Passthrough to Win VM (Parsec only, no Gamestream)

Slot 1: Intel X20-DA2 10Gbe NIC (PCIe cable to AOC-SHG3-4M2P) - Local

M.2-2: Intel Optane 900P - Local

AHCI: SSDs - Local

iGPU: UHD P630 - Passthrough to Win VM

[Notes about Supermicro X11SCA-F]

On 1/24/2020 at 12:21 AM, bwnautilus said:

Cool, thanks for this.  BTW, where did you buy the E-2278G?  I can't find them anywhere.

Lambdatek UK.

2 showed up in stock on a Sunday afternoon, so I grabbed one!

[Notes about Supermicro X11SCA-F]

On 1/1/2020 at 9:56 PM, bwnautilus said:

On a slightly different topic, has anyone tried 32GB ECC DIMMs on this MB?  I know Supermicro will only work with certain brands.

I'd like to max out the RAM to 128GB with a E-2278G (when these become available).

Yes! I received the Intel E-2278G a week ago, and 4 no. 32Gb ECC UDIMMS. I just booted for the first time into ESXi showing 128Gb of memory.

the DIMMS are: 4 no. "32GB (1x32GB) Samsung M391A4G43MB1-CTD DDR4 ECC UDIMM, PC4-21300 (2666)"

I'll carry on with the build now.