Manually enter hard disk serials

[Dj.finney]

Good evening all. I’m having what seems to be a common issue where I have two drives not showing a serial and because of this I can not create a new pool. For me the serial is not showing because boot drive and the drive for pool 2 (apps) are virtualized. Is there no way to manually create your own serials with in truenas scale? I apologize if this has been posted before I did a search for this issue and all the answers seemed to be “swap out or flash your raid controller”.

 

[sretalla]

The first point is that this is a job that needs doing in your hypervisor (if you're going to do that). You gave no details, so can't help with that specifically.

The second and possibly most important point is that if you do what you're suggesting, you're set up to lose data on that pool, so be aware.

"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

 

[Dj.finney]

The first point is that this is a job that needs doing in your hypervisor (if you're going to do that). You gave no details, so can't help with that specifically.

The second and possibly most important point is that if you do what you're suggesting, you're set up to lose data on that pool, so be aware.

"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

Correct so my setup is as follows. I have an SSD 2TB drive that is the install point for my esxi 6.5 and the location of all the virtual OSs trunas has a 64G (boot)virtual drive on this for the OS and another
64G virtual drive for apps.(pool 2)
I’m not concerned with losing that drive as I have a clone of it standing by. My data for trunas is on 6 4TB we red drives (pool 1). These mechanical drives are raw pass through to truenas. The issue I’m having is the two virtual drives have no serial assigned to them. Rather than trying to troubleshoot the hyper visor and try and find a way for it to assign a serial, why can’t I just say with in truenas that disk a is now serial 12345 and disk b is 12346. Seems like a far less complicated solution.

 

[jgreco]

all the answers seemed to be “swap out or flash your raid controller”.

You cannot have more than a single virtual disk in a pool for TrueNAS, as noted in one of the virtualization guides. For any serious virtualization, you MUST pass through the HBA or storage controller to TrueNAS. You may have misunderstood what you're seeing because it seems that you're conflating RAID controllers (NOT supported) with HBA's (LSI HBA's supported, swap out RAID for HBA) and flashing of LSI HBA's to IT phase P20.00.12.00 firmware.

 

[jgreco]

These mechanical drives are raw pass through to truenas.

You need to use PCIe passthru on the controller. Do not use ESXi RDM or whatever dumbass option Proxmox provides to "pass thru" a single device. It is not the same thing, not by a long shot.

 

[joeschmuck]

The issue I’m having is the two virtual drives have no serial assigned to them.

I do not know of a way to assign drive serial number to virtual drives.

 

[sretalla]

There's a post around here somewhere that covers how to change the serials on virtual disks in proxmox. It involves hacking the vm config file and adding a switch to each disk to specify the serial.

 

[Aipoc76]

add to your .vmx file " disk.EnableUUID=true "

That fixed all SN issues for me.

 

[joeschmuck]

add to your .vmx file " disk.EnableUUID=true "

That fixed all SN issues for me.

I'm curious on what the resulting new virtual drive serial numbers were. Were they random or something more sequential?

 

[Aipoc76]

they are somewhat sequential, but still have randomness to it. pretty much random except the first 8 characters. Example of 2 of the drives.

 

[jgreco]

they are somewhat sequential,

What part of what you quoted is "somewhat sequential"?

 

[Aipoc76]

like the first 6 characters :P

 

[jgreco]

The first 6 octets of a UUID are the number of 4 usec units of time that have passed since 1/1/80 0000 GMT. And they do not appear to be "somewhat sequential" but rather "strictly equal". In most cases, the next two to four octets have defined meaning and are often equal as well, depending on whose UUID generator you are using. The remaining octets appear to be random or obfuscated in your examples.

 

[Aipoc76]

Good to know. Ill do my homework before answering next time, cause i honestly had no idea how it generated the numbers.

 

[jgreco]

Good to know. Ill do my homework before answering next time, cause i honestly had no idea how it generated the numbers.

I was just wondering if you were seeing something that I wasn't. You never know what you might learn if you ask. Works both ways, eh. The UUID stuff is a little dicey in any case.

 

[joeschmuck]

Thanks for showing me what they look like. I was curious. Man, that is one long hexadecimal number.