HP DL380p Gen 8 crashing under i/o load?

BSTAMPER

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I'm running freenas on an HP DL380p Gen 8. Has two Xeon E5-2640 2.5Ghz Processors, 24GB ram, HP Ethernet 1Gb 4-port 331FLR Adapter, Smart Array P420i Controller (converted to hba), 8 450GB EG0450FBLSF Drives.

Currently running Freenas 12.0-U1. The only thing I use this for is iSCSI for ESX hosts.

As long as I've had this even when I was on the previous version to 12 it seems to crash and reload under high I/O. Comes back up fine and works fine after. When I'm deploying VM's etc. Otherwise for the most part it works fine. None of this would be a big deal other than my firewall runs on this and causes internet issues when it crashes. This is just home and lab so its not like a production outage (tell that to the wife and kids) :tongue:

I've downloaded the debug file for the crashes but can't really make any sense of it. Can post it if anyone can read it or think it would help. Just figure I'd post and see if anyone has seen this or would know why its happening. I've validated all the hardware is working properly via the iLO.
 

sretalla

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HP Ethernet 1Gb 4-port 331FLR Adapter
That seems to be a broadcom NIC, so the typical recommendation would be to consider changing to an Intel NIC if you're seeing things happen that might equate to the driver being tested (and failing).

You could also test disabling the hardware offload feature for the network interfaces as that may take some of the problematic factors away from the driver. (no guarantees there as it's a case of all other NICS than Intel don't have great support in FreeBSD)
 
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P420i Controller (converted to hba)
That is likely a problem. You need to use an HBA instead of a RAID controller (even if it is in HBA mode). That card would be using the ciss driver which is not ideal for FreeNAS.
 

jgreco

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The P420i is a RAID controller. It doesn't actually have HBA capabilities, they just turn off some of the RAID features to make it a stupider RAID controller. It is not suitable for use with FreeNAS. Only the LSI HBA's are known to work correctly with FreeNAS, and that is only when they're crossflashed to IT mode with a specific firmware version.

Please check out the following link.

https://www.truenas.com/community/t...s-and-why-cant-i-use-a-raid-controller.81931/
 

BSTAMPER

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I was afraid it would likely be the raid controller as I saw rumblings about that elsewhere. So question. If I get a new card. Can I just shut it down, put in the new one, plug the cables into the new one, boot it back up or am I looking at backing up everything to somewhere and rebuilding?
 

jgreco

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Well, it really depends. If it has encapsulated your data in virtual disks that are in a GPT partition of their own, you're hosed. On the other hand, that's been somewhat less common in the last decade, and if you can see the FreeBSD zfs partitions on the raw disk when directly attached to a SATA controller, it's probably just fine as is.
 

HoneyBadger

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The P420 in "HBA mode" actually behaves like an HBA and will give direct access to disks; but even in passthrough it still uses the ciss driver though which might be at fault for the reboots.

Can I just shut it down, put in the new one, plug the cables into the new one, boot it back up or am I looking at backing up everything to somewhere and rebuilding?

Are you booting off a device attached to the P420? If so, you'll probably need to play with BIOS/UEFI boot order (and make sure to leave the boot ROM on the new card) but if you're booting from SATA/USB then you're all set.
 

jgreco

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Let's please not confuse folks by saying that "behaves like an HBA"; lots of RAID cards will do that, and it is the argument that marketing departments use to mislabel it "HBA mode", but if they are still working through an unreliable firmware/driver combination, that's simply not useful. It's just a lobotomized RAID card, not an HBA.
 
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