Start a Conversation

Unsolved

D

1 Message

115

February 24th, 2024 02:18

PowerEdge R330, no SR-IOV support at all?

Hello!


I'm currently attempting to build a miniature hyper-converged infrastructure on a pair of Dell PowerEdge R330 servers (Xeon E3-1240 v4, both with HBA/RAID card slot populated).

I sourced up a pair of Dell Intel i350-T4 network adapters for this test, and ensured they had the updated firmware to support the SR-IOV functionality (both NICs are >19.5 version). I've also ensured that I'm utilizing the latest drivers available for this card, listed under my servers on the Dell support site (PowerEdge R330).
Now, internally, I have all 3 slots populated - HBA/RAID PERC 730 on the edge PCIe port (installed at factory), Dell i350-T4, and a MicroConnectors PCIe to NVMe M.2 PCIe 3.0 4x with a Samsung PM983 3.84 TB for running VMs.

It appears that there's no support on the motherboard or BIOS for SR-IOV. I can however go into the device management (System Configuration -> Device Settings) and enable SR-IOV on each individual port of the network card. However, since the slot doesn't seem to have this support, I'm unable get my virtual switches to utilize SR-IOV functionality.

Here's the very, very confusing part; I've built this exact same configuration on a single system but consumer grade.
Intel i5-6600K (Skylake CPU, same as the Xeon E3 v5's), Z170 chipset. I was unable to get the Dell i350 cards working on the CPU based PCIe slots (Slot 1/2), but the last PCIe slot (PCH) was able to provide the resources to enable SR-IOV, and I could confirm this all the way into the VM's status - SR-IOV was functioning normally according to the Hyper-V Manager (Windows Server 2022).

I'm guessing that the Dell PowerEdge servers that utilize the PERC cards have that 'dedicated' slot, which is likely provided from the PCH so they can tie into the SMBus for RAID/HBA status.

Is there any way possible of getting a modified BIOS that can enable SR-IOV functionality on the CPU based PCIe slots in the Dell PowerEdge R330? I'd really like to take advantage of all the acceleration features possible in this hardware :)

Moderator

 • 

3.9K Posts

February 26th, 2024 03:28

Hello thanks for choosing Dell and welcome to our community!

 

If you take a look at page 10, it sounds like the card is supported.

https://dell.to/3USvGdC

 

https://dell.to/3UQoTBi  

Enable Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) in the following three locations:

  • The BIOS of the MCC virtual machine
  • The network card properties of the MCC virtual machine
  • The hypervisor for the MCC virtual machine

https://dell.to/3UQoU8k

This also may help too.

 

 

No Events found!

Top