Some of you might know from writing on of the most read posts regarding the migration from vmWare to Proxmox on Reddit with almost half a million views, my scripts to deploy SSL with let's encrypt on Windows Servers or my disk formatting guide and scripts with thousands of readers and users every year.
As many of you I grew up with the 8th Gen of the HP Microserver and I always saw it as an average server with a good IPMI solution and some painful limitations (16 GB Ram) in a well engineered form factor. HP's compromises on this platform have always been painful, but the physical usability of the case made up for it in many aspects. It's like the Volkswagen of Homeservers, a little luxury, good build quality and some compromises for a sticker price that was only permissible because you hoped it would run for ages. As many of you I use decommissioned hardware at home, which means for many of us G8-10 HP or Gen 12 to 14 Dell Systems, with all the drawbacks and benefits.
So in recent years two major things happened in IT:
So here is my plan to get vGPU on Microservers running:
To safe me from the pain of wasting 1200 EUR on hardware, I need to know one thing:
does the UEFI of Proliant 10th gen servers support 4G Decoding. Unfortunately HP encrypts the update BINs so it's not possible to figure this out without having a physical machine.
What will you need to help me out on this:
vGPU using Intel Arc and Proliant servers on Proxmox.
What needs to be done?
In Short: read out the BIOS and tell me if the configuration options to make vGPU on this system possible are only hidden or non existing.
So who is nice enough to give this a try?
As many of you I grew up with the 8th Gen of the HP Microserver and I always saw it as an average server with a good IPMI solution and some painful limitations (16 GB Ram) in a well engineered form factor. HP's compromises on this platform have always been painful, but the physical usability of the case made up for it in many aspects. It's like the Volkswagen of Homeservers, a little luxury, good build quality and some compromises for a sticker price that was only permissible because you hoped it would run for ages. As many of you I use decommissioned hardware at home, which means for many of us G8-10 HP or Gen 12 to 14 Dell Systems, with all the drawbacks and benefits.
So in recent years two major things happened in IT:
- AI;
- Intel released vGPU capable cards that don't require fortunes for drivers or copyright infringements which can be downsized to one slot.
- Above 4G Decoding" is a BIOS/UEFI setting allowing the computer to allocate memory for PCIe devices (like GPUs) above the 4GB address boundary;
- Resizable Bar allowing the system to access the GPUs entire VRAM in one piece or as many as you desire.
So here is my plan to get vGPU on Microservers running:
- buy one;
- tinker with the UEFI;
- install proxmox;
- make vGPU work with it;
- document the absolute s**** out of it and post it here and on Reddit.
To safe me from the pain of wasting 1200 EUR on hardware, I need to know one thing:
does the UEFI of Proliant 10th gen servers support 4G Decoding. Unfortunately HP encrypts the update BINs so it's not possible to figure this out without having a physical machine.
What will you need to help me out on this:
- Windows installed on it barebone; it should also work with Linux, but in this specific field I have less experience;
- Some time.
vGPU using Intel Arc and Proliant servers on Proxmox.
What needs to be done?
In Short: read out the BIOS and tell me if the configuration options to make vGPU on this system possible are only hidden or non existing.
- Download UEFITool (NE version is fine), IRFExtractor-RS and grub-mod-setup_var.
- Extract IRFExtractor-RS and leave the folder for now, we will come back to it later.
- Extract body of the section that search finds. Save this .bin to our IRFExtractor-RS folder.
So who is nice enough to give this a try?