So I was installing some Fujitsu Primergy RX2530 M4 servers today, and since I mostly work with HPE and Lenovo servers I had lookup the optimal BIOS settings to run ESXi 6.5.
This is what I came up with. From the default settings I only changed a couple of things that I found important.
I kept the Override OS Energy Performance setting at Disabled, since the documentation from VMware states that it is best to let ESXi handle the power settings. This differs from what we normally do on HPE, since the best practises here is to run everything at Maximum performance. (Keep in mind that my focus is on performance, and not on energy savings, if you are concerned with this, you might want to set thing differently)
Note: I have a strong feeling that your could get better performance by disabling Cache Prefetchers, but I do not want to try this theory at a customer site, so if you have experience regarding this, please leave a comment.
After doing this you should set the server to High Performance using the vSphere Client.
The other CPU Setting that I found was the Uncore Frequency Override which I set to Maximum.
Next I set Patrol Scrub to Disabled in the Memory Configuration. The Fujitsu documents recommend to disable it for best performance, but I was a little worried about memory errors, but the documentation states that ECC will handle it to a certain point, and I will get an alarm in vCenter from the hardware, so we should be safe.
Impressions
I must admit that I was very impressed with these servers. Wow they boot really fast, and the boot process is a big part of the wait time when working with ESXi, but on these servers this was a breeze. A cold boot to connection in vCenter took only 4:05.
References:
Fujitsu Primergy BIOS Settings Best Practises
vSphere 6.5 Performance Best_Practices – page 17