Upgrade the BIOS and Firmware on the SuperMicro Board

Ok. Before I start the blog post on how to upgrade the BIOS and firmware on your supermicro board, I have a small rant. It seems there is surprisingly little useful information out there, on how to upgrade the bios and firmware for the supermicro. There are definitely plenty of documents, and lengthy PDFs provided by SuperMicro, but I found most of them were not useful. Too much content, not enough layman instruction. Especially for something as crucial as updating the bios.

Like did you know there is a UI for your SuperMicro board, accessible over your home network? I didn’t. Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) is what it’s called. Did you know that you pretty much have to pay a license fee just to use some features on that UI? I didn’t as well. We’ll cover all that in the blog below.

So, I have learned quite a bit about this process over the past day, and I’m documenting in this blog so hopefully you don’t have to go through those same challenges. But let me throw this disclaimer up at the top, loud and clear. I AM NOT AN EXPERT AT UPGRADING/UPDATING THE BIOS AND FIRMWARE. Even if I was an expert, this process is risky and can brick your board. Don’t do it unless you’re experiencing problems with your board, or if you’re 4 years out of date like I was.

Let’s begin…

Table of Contents

Accessing the UI for your SuperMicro board

Your SuperMicro board has a UI, or at least mine does. From what I’ve read, most later generation boards have this feature. My board was from 2020 timeframe, and I think they’ve had it well before that. Let me know in the comments if you know more about the timelines. There’s a couple ways you can get the IP address for the board, but to get the password, you must open up the server and find the password on a sticker. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the only way to find it from what I can tell.

Getting the Motherboard password

Go ahead and shut your server down, and pull the cables from the back and remove the cover. See the below picture for what you’re looking for.

I’ve circled in red the area on the SuperMicro where I found my password.

Go ahead and take a picture or write down the PWD. Mine was 10 Characters long, all letters.

Getting the Motherboard IP Address

There’s a few ways I’ve found to get this IP address, but I will say it’s something that I never configured manually. I have DHCP running in my environment, and I’m assuming the default setting is to use DHCP. I’m sure there is a way to configure this in the BIOS statically, so if you don’t see the IP address with any of the below methods, then boot into your BIOS after restarting your server and dig around in there.

Method 1: Restart the Server and watch the boot screens

As simple as stated above, just restart the server and make sure you have a monitor attached via VGA. I was able to see the BMC IP Address on the bottom right, as shown below. I had about 30 seconds or so to grab a picture, plenty of time to capture the address. After this page changes, I was no longer able to see it again, without a reboot.

My Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) is 192.168.2.158

Method 2: Check your DNS/Router for a DHCP reservation

I have an Ubiquiti router, and there is an option in the UI to see a list of Client Devices.

So a quick search for Supermicro and I was able to find the entry. Check your local DHCP/DNS server to see if you have this ability. If not, you can always just reboot your server, hookup a monitor, and watch the initial boot screens.

Access the SuperMicro BMC

Access the IP address above via HTTP or HTTPS and you should see the below screen.

If you can’t access the IP address, it could have grabbed a DHCP address from an unroutable network. Just use your standard networking troubleshooting skills to diagnose the problem. All my subnets that route through my Unifi router are routed.

The username is “ADMIN” in all caps. Password will be that PWD we found on the Motherboard.

Upgrading the SuperMicro Motherboard firmware

Let’s start with the firmware. For no other reason than it’s what I did. Maybe the BIOS is supposed to be upgraded first, who knows.

Download the BIOS/FIRMWARE Update Zip file

Find your motherboard on the Supermicro site and download the zip file update for it.
My board is the MBD-M11SDV-8C+-LN4F-O Mini ITX Server Motherboard.

Look at the right side of the Motherboard specs page, and click on “Update your BIOS”

You’ll see the zip file above, download this file and extract it.

Here’s a list of the files that were extracted from the ZIP file above. The only 2 archives I used, were the 2 highlighted above. BIOS and BMC.

Go ahead and extract both of those archives, and you can delete the others.

As shown above.

Update the Supermicro Motherboard firmware

Navigate back to the BMC UI, and take note of the current versions of firmware and BIOS.

Firmware Revision: 03.16.01
BIOS version: 1.0c

Navigate to Maintenance -> Firmware Update

Click “Enter Update Mode”

Acknowledge the warning and click Yes

Select the file that is in the extracted BMC folder, looks like BMC………bin
Once you’ve selected the file, click Upload Firmware.

You’ll see an indicator saying that the image is uploading. This takes about 30 seconds or so.

Eventually the page will refresh and show you the above screen, I left everything default and clicked Start Upgrade.

Finally you can see the process. This took about 3-5 minutes.

Almost there……

Finally the update is finished. I get a popup saying to wait a minute and retry the UI. The server will reboot now.

UI Errors

Special note on the BMC UI, I found it relatively finicky. You can get stuck in upgrade modes, without reason. The UI error reporting is very limited. An example of getting stuck would be that you select the update file above, and click “Upload Firmware”, then nothing happens. I waited 30 minutes to see if anything would happen. Logged out of UI, logged back in. Nothing would fix it. I kept getting a warning saying the device is in Update mode.

If you get stuck in an update mode, it seems a reboot doesn’t fix the issue. The way I fixed it was to reattempt the firmware update, and click Cancel (instead of “Upload Firmware”) to exit the update mode. You will lose UI access for a minute or so but it seems to clear the issue.

Validate the firmware update.

Log back into the UI and validate the install.

Firmware Revision: 03.17.05
Looks like the update was successful.

Upgrading the SuperMicro Motherboard BIOS

Ok, now that the firmware is updated, let’s do the same for the BIOS. I explored a number of different methods for this, and all failed except for the one shown below. The method shown below also costs some money, in a licensing fee. I tried updating the BIOS via a flashdrive, with the .bin file. But the commands to run on the SuperMicro were odd, since you have to specify a BIOS name, and I couldn’t figure out what that was. There’s some kind of SUM tool, but it’s poorly documented and I didn’t even really explore it. So if you want to update the BIOS using the following guide, you’ll need to spend $27.

Purchasing a license key for the Supermicro BMC

There are certain features of the Supermicro BMC UI that are blocked unless you license the software. One of those features is the ability to update the BIOS. Again there are other methods to update the BIOS, I tried them and couldn’t get any of them working. So I bought these licenses. If you choose to do the same, see below.

Navigate to this Supermicro page to purchase a license. If the link fails, the license I purchased was “Supermicro Out of Band (OOB) Software License Key (SFT-OOB-LIC)”

It takes an hour or two, but eventually you will get an email about activating the Serial key.

Generate the Key

You will receive an email that looks like the following..

You will need the Board Serial number in order to generate the key. You can find that back in your Supermicro BMC, under System -> FRU Reading. Shown below.

Example below of the generated key.

Navigate back to the BMC. Go to Miscellaneous -> Activate License

Click Activate.

Accept the warning. lol

And you probably won’t get any UI notification if it was successful. I’d recommend logging out, and log back in, and see if it was licensed. If not, try again. Like I said earlier, the UI is finicky.