Supermicro Fan Problems

If you are running Noctua cooling fans in your PC and the PC is cycling fans up and down, then it’s probably because the motherboard thinks a fan has failed and is ramping them all up to compensate.

This is happening because Noctua fans run a lower RPM than other fan models.

If you are trying to fix this fan problem on an esxi host, you will need to install IPMITool from here: Installing IPMITool on ESXI

This tutorial taken from here: Supermicro motherboard loud fans

To fix this, requires editing the fan config via IPMITOOL.

Open a command line on your server, and download or install ipmitool:

apt-get install ipmitool

List the fans of the motherboard with:

ipmitool -I lan -U ADMIN -H 10.100.10.200 sensor

If you’re running on the actual host, you can just use this:

ipmitool sensor

The listing will include all the relevant fan Ids the motherboard recognizes.

You will need to update the lower speed limits of each fan, with the following:

ipmitool -I lan -U ADMIN -H 10.100.10.200 sensor thresh FAN1 lower 150 225 300

Or, from the local host:

ipmitool sensor thresh FAN1 lower 150 225 300

Repeat the above command for each fan Id that shows up in the sensor listing.

The above command has these switches:

ADMIN – enter username of your IPMI interface

10.1550.20.200 – enter IP address of your IPMI interface

FAN1 – FAN for which you want to set values

150 – lower non-recoverable value

225 – lower critical value

300 – lower non-critical value

Usually, the change is immediate.
But if not, shutdown the host, disconnect the power cord for a few minutes.
Then, reboot. And, it should be corrected.