BUILD Fujitsu Primergy tx200 S7 esxi6 + FreeNAS project

[emlock]

Good morning everybody,

i’m here to show you my project with all my doubts… last year i buyed a used fujitsu primergy tx200 s7 with xeon e5 2407, 32gb ddr3 ecc ram and 4 sas 15k 450gb each attached to a raid controller fujitsu d2616-a22

Now surfing on the net i found a good guide to install freenas as a virtual machine on esxi 6 configured with passthrough directly to the drives, but after some tests i realize that the raid controller needs to become an HBA with the crossflash in IT firmware, reading the server manual says that there is a sas/sata scu port which it can be useful for my project so i attached the mini sas cable to the scu port but the sas drives are not recognised and i don’t know why ( if someone could explain this).

Last night i run some other tests and find out that sata drives works fine with that port (bios settings are scu port enabled and op rom disabled).

The final setup will be as i thought in my mind like it follows:

· Change the 4 sas drives with 4 sata drives, maybe hitachi ultrastar 7k3000 2tb will do the job

· Attached the backplane with the 4 sata drives to the scu port disabling op rom from bios and remove the ds2616-a22 raid card from the server

· In esxi activate passthrough in the intel corporation patsburg 4 port sata storage control unit

· Create freenas vm with 2 cores and at least 8gb of ram and add pci device

· When the vm is up and running set up the volume maybe raidz1 to preserve some space

· Configure iscsi pointing to esxi to use as an auxiliari datastore for other vms

· The esxi 6, freenas and sophos utm are stored in a sata drive of 320gb (planning to change it with an ssd)

This is IMHO the best setup i can build without spending a fortune (in fact it only needs 4 sata drives), if you have better ideas or maybe some changes that you will make at this project please let me know…

Finally remains one big question: is the scu port integrated into the server motherboard suitable for this task? Or i can have problems in future with bad smart logs and other problems?


Thanks to all for the help

 

[emlock]

nobody?

 

[m0nkey_]

The Fujitsu D2616-A22 is likely a LSI SAS2004 chipset. You will need to flash it to IT mode before you can install FreeNAS.

 

[emlock]

in fact i'm not using the d2616 raid card but i'm using the internal intel mini sas port... overall you think that is a good setup?

 

[jgreco]

You'd probably need to find out more about the SCU and whether or not it's supported (I'd guess it is). Plus whether or not it is enabled and configured, for example in the BIOS or by jumpers on the system board.

 

[emlock]

thanks, now the SCU is enabled without op-rom, the alternatives were op-rom lsi or op-rom intel rst.
in any case it works but there are so poor information about the internal SCU functions.
another question about the crossflash of the d2616-a22: is the process reversible? it will give better performance than the SCU counting that is equipped with 512mb of ram and Battery backup unit?
If the build is approved i can order the missing material (new sata disks and maybe in future an exacore e5-2430L), advises accepted!

Thanks everybody

 

[jgreco]

A RAID controller with RAM and a BBU is generally one of LSI's higher end controllers. These are never cross-flashable to IT mode, and are almost never ideal for use with FreeNAS. You can almost certainly make them "work." However, what you want isn't something that "works", you want something that you're confident in and that you know won't ruin your day (and your data). That's still a plain HBA, or a low-end RAID controller flashed into HBA (IT) mode.

This may not be what you want to hear, but it's what five years of observations suggest is the correct answer.

Also, the "L" versions of CPU's are almost never a good idea. They run at a lower clock speed and in the long run they may actually use more power for similar workloads.

 

[emlock]

so your advise is to stay with the SCU? in any case i don't want to flash in IT mode an high level raid card that could fail during the process... speaking of the cpu i choose that because of the 12 threads that are considered by vmware as processor, so my processing power will be 2,5ghz in turbo mode x 12 thread instead of my actual e5 2407 quad core that is 2,4 x 4 threads.
If i have to buy a low level raid card or HBA i would like to know which one choose without doing crossflashing... is there a native hba card with 2 mini sas port?

Thanks

 

[jgreco]

Mini-SAS, or mini-SAS HD (which some people think is "mini-SAS" because they think "mini-SAS" is actually "SAS")? You're better referring to them by connector name. Do you mean SFF-8087 or SFF-8643?

For SFF-8087, you should be able to pick up a standard LSI 9211-8i and maybe just need to change the firmware version, which can be done from within FreeNAS.

 

[emlock]

http://www.scsi4me.com/images/Areca_CB-8787-75M.jpg
the cable is this one so a SFF-8087 attached directly to the motherboard of the server, onestly i don't want to spend money for an hba if the internal SFF-8087 is suitable for my needs.

Thanks

 

[jgreco]

http://www.scsi4me.com/images/Areca_CB-8787-75M.jpg
the cable is this one so a SFF-8087 attached directly to the motherboard of the server, onestly i don't want to spend money for an hba if the internal SFF-8087 is suitable for my needs.

Thanks

So try it. If it works, yay. If it doesn't, boo.

 

[emlock]

actually is already working because i'm already testing it on the server with one sata drive and it works, the only shame is that works only with sata drives because if i put a sas drive it doesn't recognise it even from the bios, that is very strange...
by the way i don't know which raid configuration take... is it possible to change from mirror to raidz1? first buying 2 drives in mirror then add drives in future... you know what i mean?

 

[jgreco]

I believe some of the SCU's are SATA only. You would need to identify the SCU and do a little legwork. For example the C602 PCH doesn't support SAS.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/supermicro-x9srl-f-build-check.17677/page-3#post-277470

by the way i don't know which raid configuration take... is it possible to change from mirror to raidz1? first buying 2 drives in mirror then add drives in future... you know what i mean?

No. Once a ZFS vdev has been created, it cannot be changed from mirror to RAIDZ, sorry.

 

[emlock]

Many thanks for the SCU information but if you were me what will you choose? a raidz or a mirror? considering the possibility of upgrade and future developments?
many thanks

 

[emlock]

anyone?

 

[emlock]

hi all,
sorry for my absence but i have taken a little time to study my situation. freenas is up and running with 3 sata disk 1,5tb each and is running well i think with a single vdev devided in a dataset for samba purposes and a zvol for iscsi target on my esxi server. now the thing i want to change is the hard drives, so i'm oriented to 4 toshiba DT01ACA300 drives configured in raid 10.
inside my raid10 there will be a dataset with a samba share and a zvol used as iscsi target datastore for my esxi server. The questions are:

1. is the intel c602 scu compatible with drives larger than 2tb? i didn't find a certain answer on the net... i suppose that the scu is 4 drive sata2 then the raid10 will be bottlenecked by that limitation? if there will be a bottleneck i'm forced to buy an hba card will you advice me some cheap and easy to flash card?
   
2. regarding samba shares i have a strange behavior with the share mapped on windows because it only displays the remaining space of the entire pool including the zvol is there some flag or something that i miss?

I have also a some dubts regarding flashing in IT mode a raid card: models like lsi 9211-8i are ready for it mode out of the box or even these requires crossflash? is the crossflash a reversible process?

Thanks

 

[emlock]

no one?

 

[Ericloewe]

I have also a some dubts regarding flashing in IT mode a raid card: models like lsi 9211-8i are ready for it mode out of the box or even these requires crossflash?

You don't need to crossflash the LSI SAS 9211, but you do need to flash the correct firmware version (currently P20.00.07 IT mode).

is the crossflash a reversible process?

Why would you want to? They're somewhat sucky RAID controllers.

 

[emlock]

so if i'm not mistaken if i buy for example a perc h310 i'll need crossflash but in a pure model like lsi 9211 i only need to flash the IT firmware correct?
regarding samba share anyone have ideas? maybe it's a question of quota even if i tried to set it up

Thanks

 

[Ericloewe]

so if i'm not mistaken if i buy for example a perc h310 i'll need crossflash but in a pure model like lsi 9211 i only need to flash the IT firmware correct?

Yes.

regarding samba shares i have a strange behavior with the share mapped on windows because it only displays the remaining space of the entire pool including the zvol is there some flag or something that i miss?

I'm not sure what you think the problem is. What else is supposed to be displayed?