AMD Opteron 6272 and ESXi 5.5 - No Turbo!

[bh2014]

Hi,

First time here, hopefully someone will be able to help me to stop pulling my hair out over my new Opteron lab!

I have recently purchased (off eBay) a SuperMicro H8DG6-F motherboard with two Opteron 6272 processors to run my ESXi 5.5 lab.

All is running perfectly, apart from the CPU turbo mode. The cores do not appear to be turbo'ing at all.

I have updated the BIOS to the latest version on the SuperMicro site, enabled and disabled every BIOS processor setting there is, fiddled with the ESXi power management but the cores do not go above 2100Mhz.

I am using ESXTop to monitor the P and C states, I notice that it doesn't show C6 states, I'm not sure if it's supposed to but I understand that C6 has to be enabled for the AMD's to turbo?

Has anyone else had similar issues?

Thanks in advance!

 

[sm625]

Set power policy to "high perfromance". I read in an article that turbo is disabled in "balanced" power policy. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5058/amds-opteron-interlagos-6200/9

What is your "PowerCap" set to in the bios?

 

[bh2014]

Hi sm625,

Thanks for your reply.

I have seen the Anandtech page during trying to figure this out. Setting the power management within a Windows VM seems to do very little, possibly nothing. ESXi appears to control all processor features including the turbo mode. I have the p-state set to 0 in the BIOS, the highest this BIOS will let me go. There is a separate turbo setting in the BIOS which is enabled, this setting along with C6 is only available when PowerNow is enabled.

I have contacted SuperMicro to ask if there is a different BIOS that might work a bit better with ESXi.

I have read that the turbo is initiated from the OS, so I think that ESXi isn't aware of the turbo...

Very odd!

 

[WOTMODS]

Hi sm625,

Thanks for your reply.

I have seen the Anandtech page during trying to figure this out. Setting the power management within a Windows VM seems to do very little, possibly nothing. ESXi appears to control all processor features including the turbo mode. I have the p-state set to 0 in the BIOS, the highest this BIOS will let me go. There is a separate turbo setting in the BIOS which is enabled, this setting along with C6 is only available when PowerNow is enabled.

I have contacted SuperMicro to ask if there is a different BIOS that might work a bit better with ESXi.

I have read that the turbo is initiated from the OS, so I think that ESXi isn't aware of the turbo...

Very odd!

Try ESXi power management settings on configuration tab - power management - using vsphere client...