3 SAS HBA's LSI SAS2008(B1 and B2)

[RegularJoe]

Hi All,

I am having issues with LSI SAS HBA's

I had a HP DL380g6 running two 921x-8i HBA's with BIOS enabled

I added a 9201-16e

I had all kinds of issues upgrading from 9.10 to 11.1 and 11.2, the only way I was able to get the upgrade to work was disable the cards in the BIOS, yank all the drives and boot off the sata port. I am running in VMware so when crash I mean purple screen of death for VMware. I do have a screen shot of the FreeNAS console where it hangs, then I tell VMware to reboot and I get the pruple screen. That is not what I need help with, I am over that.

I used sas2flsh -c 0 -o -e 5 to erase the bios from all three cards and I can boot and reboot without any crashing, the thing I am missing is the 9201-16e is not showing the 12 drives. When I had the BIOS enabled I could see the first 4 drives when I had them plugged in. I had this HP D2600 working for months in a Lenovo TS140 with just ONE HBA. So I know the hardware is functional.

Is there a tunable that tell's FreeBSD to look for card #3?

FreeNAS 11.2-u1 with firmware p20 on the LSI cards, I do see at boot up it is loading version 21 of the driver, do you think I should upgrade all 3 HBA's to firmware 21?

Thanks,
Joe

 

[RegularJoe]

Well that night on Sunday was a long night, forgot to pass a HBA thru from VMware to the VM..

But I did uncover a VERY ugly bug, that nobody cares about. LOL

VMware was working fine and the HP D2600 running on a Lenovo TS140 was running fine for months.

Then I decided to put the LSI 9201-16e in the HP DL380 G6 with the external D2600 shelf. The first boot works fine but when I reboot the FreeNAS 11.2-u1 VM it would lock up.

The issue was some odd compatibility with VMware 5.5 and the SCSI LSI virtual boot drive. When I changed that boot drive to LSI SATA boot in ESXi vCenter the issue went away. I think this ONLY happens if you are using the 9210-8i/9211-8i and 9201-16e cards with your VM booting a virtual LSI SATA disk, IDE or SATA boot would have not made this bug show up. It might not exist in VMware 6.0/6.5/6.7

Even having NO BIOS in the HBA's it would still hang after a reboot and cause VMware to purple screen crash!