Thank you both, unfortunately doesn't make things any clearer, trying to focus mostly on the Microserver gen8 since it's by far the most affected model but can't find anything in common why some are not affected:
-jkpe's BIOS matches a lot of the affected models, quack75 has a different date but since the other matches it doesn't really matter.
-some of the affected users have a bare stock server, without any extra card/controllers, others have an extra NIC, controller, NVMe device, etc
-affected models all have Xeon CPUs, which is required for vt-d on these servers, and both Sandybridge and Ivybridge can be affected