VT5 and HP DL380 G6 compatibility

[garethdavis]

Just a quick warning that we have found that a number of PCI based video devices (including VT5) are not compatible with the generation 6 DL380 server from HP. Symptoms range from the server reporting voltage failures on the PCI bus, to slow PCI reads resulting in video capture of about 2 fps.

HP have informed me that the PCI options such as bus master and latency are not user configurable from their 'optimum' factory settings, and that the slots comply with industry standards. They do not consider a third party device not working to be a fault, which isn't especially helpful.

VT5 does work correctly in HP DL380 Generation 5 server.

Digital Rapids have already published a technical support note on their website about the G6 servers being incompatible with their cards, so I thought it would be worthwhile to share my experience with Newtek and the user community in case they wished to do the same thing.

Regards,

Gareth Davis
Systems Specialist
BBC World Service

[rbartlett]

Very useful to know. Thanks Gareth.

My sceptical side would wait for someone internally in HP to find this. ie by making their own version of the 'first discovery' of a performance failing and fix this with a new BIOS or hardware revision sometime in the future! The time this could take may well be longer than previous generations (of server) what with PCIe becoming all the more popular.

We've seen Dell go through similar generation failure with their Precision workstations. Good to know what works and what doesn't for 'off-the-peg' VT builds.

[inquisitive]

The other issue you may be facing if you are using the old VT2/3 card is that the PCI slot must be 5.0V, apparently the older cards do not work on 3.3V PCI slots. I have been looking into moving out of a 533Mhz bus motherboard and that is what I have been researching recently.