Supermicro X10SDV-F Xeon D-1540 SoC Motherboard Review

Software Overview

Almost any server motherboard comes with remote management and as we saw earlier, so does this one and you can see it further down. Supermicro also bundles their SuperDoctor 5 application with this Mini-ITX board and it’s quite a nifty tool for system admins.

Supermicro SuperDoctor 5

SuperDoctor5 monitors system health of hardware and operating system services from the target nodes in real-time and provides alerts to administrators on availability of systems in datacenters.

You can keep an eye on your hardware, such as fan speed, temperature, voltage, chassis intrusion, redundant power failure, power consumption, disk health, and memory health as well as software monitoring of HTTP, FTP, and SMTP services.

SuperDoctor 5 has a built-in alert and notification features that can send a notification when host or service state changes via email and SNMP traps.

You can define yourself what parts you want to monitor as well as set high and low limits.

Updating your BIOS remotely through the SD5 tool isn’t a problem either and a great convenience.

Remote Management

As I previously mentioned, pretty much every server motherboard comes with an IPMI remote interface these days and Supermicro’s looks great and is very easy to use. Find the IP in your BIOS, Router, or use a network scanner to locate it.

It works both when the system is running, but also when it is turned off. All it requires is the motherboard to be connected to an active power supply.

System

The first pane that welcomes you is the System pane that gives you a quick summary of your system.

Server Health

The Server health pane shows data related to the server’s health such as fan, temperature, and voltage sensor readings and the event log.

Configuration

Getting to the configuration page and the whole thing gets a little more interesting. The pages are all self-explaining, so I’ll keep my babbling to a minimum in this section.

Remote Control

The remote control allows you to launch console redirections and connections to your SQL console if that is installed, it does however require JAVA to run and that can be an issue for some browsers these days. It works, you just have to use a JAVA enabled browser. You can also control the servers power state from this section.

Virtual Media

Virtual Media is a really cool feature that allows you to upload and share drive images to BMC. The image will be emulated to the host as USB device and it works with both floppy images and CD-ROM images up to 4.7GB.

Maintenance

Maintenance allows to to update the firmware and BIOS as well as general maintenance tasks for the IPMI and IKVM.

Miscellaneous

This is the last real pane in this remote control interface and it holds a couple of good functions such as post snooping, SMC RAKP, and UID Control.

Help

Pressing the help button will not open another page, but a panel to the right that will give you more information on the page that you’re currently viewing.