Recently, my DL380 G9 started doing A LOT of noise with the fans.
I knew these servers where noisy, but I hadn't change the server workload, so something was off..
I started the journey looking around and seeing the normal issues for these. Normally it was related to Gen 8-7 and driver upgrades.
Since I hadn't had the issue before, I wasn't confident that the driver updates would help in any way. I talked with ChatGPT to see what it would suggest, and, as expected, it suggested fixing the redundant battery for the raid. This was in no way related to the issue, but ChatGPT sees something wrong and fixates on it hard.
In the end, I got the battery, shut down the server, and took a bit of time to cleanup everything, just in case airflow decreased dramatically.
While doing this, I noticed the heat sink on the raid controller was moving a bit! Looking a bit more on it it has some plastic legs to press the heat sink into the chip, and one of them snaped.
Ah... that would do it... I replaced the plastic leg with a small m3, making sure it would not touch any circuit of the board. Took the chance to place the battery and finally fix that second issue the server has been complaining about for ages.
Restarted the server and monitored for a bit and...
So far so good! The sensor 23 (where the P840 is connected) went from 80-90º to 70º, and the fans also lowered from 50% to 13%! much quieter and a happier wife.
This was enough, really, and I'm quite happy it wasn't something bigger. But it got me thinking how the current airflow is not good enough for the PCI-3 connection. Air will reach the back but not that much, and running at 50-80% is a turbojet I wan't to avoid.
So the next plan is to improve the heat dissipation on the back. I have 2 ideas I can try:
- Add a dedicated fan
I have a few 40mm fans not being used. I didn't know where to install the fan, given that these servers don't provide standard fan connections. But r/homelab They recommended a USB adapter, and I'll try that.
The person who mentioned this said they had 30º less after adding the fan. I'm quite interested to see if this replicates in my case.
- Install a bigger heat sink
The current heat sink is quite small, and there's plenty of space for more. It may get trickier since the holes need to align, and it doesn't seem to be a market out there for this. So I'll only try this after the fan experiment.
Updating drivers
While drivers weren't related to the issue, I was also not in the latest versions, so I took the chance to update a few.
It took me a while to understand how HPE provides these, since there is a package called SSP that will bring all drivers to the "recommended" versions, but this requires a subscription that seems I don't have.
So you are left downloading each package by hand. Some can be updated on iLO firmware page, but others, like the P840 are rpm packages.
I use Proxmox, hence rpm will not work... so I had to convert them to cpio
apt install rpm
rpm2cpio /tmp/firmware-smartarray-ea3138d8e8-7.20-1.1.x86_64.rpm | cpio -idmv
cd ./usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/firmware-smartarray-ea3138d8e8-7.20-1.1/
./hpsetupReboot and done!