HP DL 380 Gen9 hardware raid

[thegreek1]

Hello, I understand that it is solution to using freenas is ZFS. How do I set up the disks in the raid tool using the 440ar card, raid 0? or should I just leave the disks alone and let freenas do its thing? Now that is for a bare metal install, or should I go ahead and install ESXi 7.x and then run freenas over it?

 

[sretalla]

That card won't be a good option for ZFS. Please read this:

What's all the noise about HBA's, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

This is relevant to FreeNAS and TrueNAS CORE. Some parts of it might also be relevant to Scale, but I don't really know how reliable the Linux drivers are. 1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with...

www.truenas.com

Also, this:

"Absolutely must virtualize TrueNAS!" ... a guide to not completely losing your data.

[---- 2018/02/27: This is still as relevant as ever. As PCIe-Passthru has matured, fewer problems are reported. I've updated some specific things known to be problematic ----] [---- 2014/12/24: Note, there is another post discussing how to deploy a small FreeNAS VM instance for basic file...

www.truenas.com

 

[thegreek1]

thanks for the link, now is there a document on setting up the controllers? at this time my server can only see 8 of 16 drives

 

[sretalla]

If I remember the options on a DL 380 Gen9, there are several backplane configurations that were offered... some of them split.

How have you connected your HBA to the backplane and what option do you have?

 

[thegreek1]

This is what I have to work with. The only HBA is my fiber cards

 

[jgreco]

thanks for the link, now is there a document on setting up the controllers?

Yes, the document on setting up the controllers is the one above where it tells you not to use it. The "remove it and replace it with an HBA" is, I suppose, implied.

This is what I have to work with. The only HBA is my fiber cards

This is not going to work out well. ZFS will throw crushing amounts of I/O at a storage array and an 8Gbps link to the host can only work for maybe three, possibly four drives before it gets flooded out. This has been discussed in the past and you really don't want to try it.

 

[thegreek1]

thank you, now what recommendations do you have for a LSi card that works well with my dl380

 

[jgreco]

thank you, now what recommendations do you have for a LSi card that works well with my dl380

To connect a FC shelf? None. The fundamental problem is that ZFS can throw a ton of I/O at your disk shelf, and you really do need something that is closer to being able to handle that than a mere 8Gbps. For example, if you have a 24Gbps SAS disk shelf (that's 4 lanes of 6Gbps = 24Gbps) with 12 HDD's that can each peak at about 3Gbps, that's generally workable because the theoretical max of about 36Gbps is only 50% more than the 24Gbps link, and there are seeks to help mitigate the situation so that you probably don't actually hit that 24Gbps capacity in any production scenario. But the FC link is so much slower.

If you can, find a shelf that does 6Gbps or (better yet) 12Gbps SAS and then just use a conventional LSI 9207-8i/9217-8i (6Gbps) or 9300-8i (12Gbps) controller or one of the crossflashed OEM equivalents.

 

[thegreek1]

Okay so I took the plunge and purchased 2 LSI HP220 cards that were flashed to P20 IT Mode for Freenas, I was hoping to find it all on one card by the 9260 (4*sff-8087) was more than purchasing 2 cards, even the 92xx 16i were too pricey!