Tag Archives: poweredge

How to add a GPU to a Dell PowerEdge R330 Server and use it for Plex transcoding on a VM under ESXi

I am happy to announce that today I was able to successfully add a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to my Dell PowerEdge R330 server in order to use it for Plex transcoding on a VM under ESXi. After extensive research, I ended up settling on a NVIDIA Quadro P400 which can be found used for fairly cheap these days.

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How to lower fan speed on a Dell PowerEdge server after adding a 3rd party card

The goal of this post is to show you how to lower fan speed on a Dell Poweredge server after adding a 3rd party card.

Most Dell PowerEdge servers specially rack mounted versions usually don’t support GPUs so after trying and adding one as a test I was quick to discover that since it doesn’t recognize the card, iDRAC kicks up its fans in order to compensate for the possible extra heat generated by the new addition. As I discovered that the GPU performs to my satisfaction (even though not officially supported) I wanted to figure out a way to reduce the fan speeds back to the state prior to the addition but digging through iDRAC yielded no solution.

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How to force passthrough of internal USB controller on a Dell PowerEdge Server

Dell and vmware logo

Recently I’ve decided to give Frigate a try since as some of you already know, motion detection on most cameras can be very flaky at times and I was looking for a permanent solution to false alerts outside my home. One of the issues I encountered during the process was Frigate suggests the use of a Google Coral Accelerator for object detection (which I was lucky enough to score one during the chip shortage) but since my Frigate instance is running under a VM on ESXi, I needed to passthrough the Coral to the VM which turns out it doesn’t work under ESXi 7.x. Simply plugging in the Coral to my PowerEdge R330 server and passing it through to the VM wasn’t enough.

ESXi Host PCI devices settings