We bought an HP ProLiant DL320e Gen8 v2
server at office, to be used to run internal applications under Linux.
Our OS choice runs between CentOS 6.5 and openSUSE 13.1, though the server is certified for RHEL/SLES.
The first difference we noticed between Windows (another identical machine running it) and Linux is fan noise: it's been a common problem around the Internet for HP servers.
Today I have successfully installed and upgraded (via zypper dist-upgrade
) openSUSE 13.1 to get the latest version of kernel and modules. I also took care to install lm_sensors
, ipmitool
and their related sensor packages. The fans are still noisy when compared to Windows.
I know that HP released drivers for RHEL/SLES and they are freely downloadable. But these drivers don't seem to include thermal/fan sensors: they are mainly RAID and Ethernet drivers.
Anyway, running ipmitool sdr
displays fan speed for 3 fans at 33%. Well, the server has only 2 fans mounted in the front panel. So it seems not a driver/module issue on my kernel version.
The question is
Given the experience with my personal laptop running openSUSE 13.1, in which the system fan is not always at maximum speed but spins at a much higher speed than Windows on the same machine, is it possible to govern fan speed in this server machine to reasonable noise levels?