BIOS Options greyed out on B Series servers

[akhan0002]

Hi,

We want to disable the following BIOS options on the B200 M3 series servers -

Adjacent Cache Line Prefetch

Hardware Prefetcher

Demand-based Power MGMT 

However on the 'Create BIOS Policy' Wizard the above options are not available.

When you directly console in to the servers and go into the BIOS the options are greyed out.

How can we change them on the B200 M3 Servers?

[Keny Perez]

Hello,

That happens cause you probably have that server´s Service Profile bounded to a Updating Template, which means that whatever change you apply to a Service Profile (associate to that template) will change the same to others.

If you want to make that change, then go to the server in question, "General" tab and then click on the Service Profile name (looks like a hyperlink).  In the "General" tab for the Service Profile (cause there will be a pop window for the Service Profile), you will read something about a warning telling you that it belongs to a template.

Unbind it and make the changes.  If you want to do the change for all of the servers associated to the same template, then do NOT unbind the template, but make the change on the template/Service Profile itself instead and it will propagate to the rest of the servers.  Use Caution though, multiple servers can be affected if you are not conscious of what you are doing.

Check here, Slide 31 you will find a nice explanation in case you don´t what I mean when I am talking about templates.

http://www.alcatron.net/Cisco%20Live%202013%20Melbourne/Cisco%20Live%20Content/Data%20Centre%20And%20Virtualisation/BRKCOM-1005%20%20UCS%20Architecture%20Overview.pdf   OR just google "BRKCOM-1005"

-Rate ALL helpful answers.

-Kenny

[Walter Dey]

As you found out, you cannot set this values with the BIOS policy advisor, nor do this values show up in the default BIOS policy for B200-M3.

Therefore, Cisco doesn't allow you to change this values; this is hardware dependent, and happened in the past for other blade models.

[akhan0002]

Wdey,

What Cisco do is organize these into groups and apply them via the 'Processor' tab in the 'Create BIOS Policy' wizard. If you look at the options for the 'CPU Performance' in here:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/sw/gui/config/guide/2-2/b_UCSM_GUI_Configuration_Guide_2_2/b_UCSM_GUI_Configuration_Guide_2_1_chapter_011110.html#reference_B158534E2FBF4F81A1D2807B80D84134

It states:

Sets the CPU performance profile for the server. This can be one of the following:

• enterprise—For M3 servers, all prefetchers and data reuse are enabled. For M1 and M2 servers, data reuse and the DCU IP prefetcher are enabled, and all other prefetchers are disabled.
• high-throughput—Data reuse and the DCU IP prefetcher are enabled, and all other prefetchers are disabled.
• hpc—All prefetchers are enabled and data reuse is disabled. This setting is also known as high performance computing.

So i have enabled the 'high-throughput' radio button and this seems to have worked.

[Walter Dey]

Excellent !

Now you have to watch out, that the OS will not override this settings, e.g. in vSphere, you have similar capabilities.