SOLVED Compellent SC8000-SC220 LSI 9201-16e No Drives

[sirEgghead]

We decommissioned some Compellent hardware at work (fully operational) and I'm trying to fire it up in a lab environment with SCALE 23.10.0.1 and I'm having issues seeing the drives through my SAS card. The "controller" is a Compellent SC8000, which is just a Dell R710 chassis with no drives. I have SCALE installed on a USB drive for the time being, but I will install it to the internal SD card later.

I have several SC220 shelves and several SC200 shelves. I have the SC220 connected per the instructions in the deployment manual. The drives in the shelf are the original drives, if not in the original configuration. The configuration of the SC8000 hardware is the same as it was in production as well.

https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/scale-doesnt-have-drivers-for-lsi-9201-16e.92223/
https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/fails-to-boot-cant-import-boot-pool.87487/

The two links above seem to be similar and I have followed the directions in both, which seem to contain the same solution, but I have not yet succeeded in seeing any drives. lsblk only shows my USB drive and its partitions.

lspci -k shows my LSI SAS2116 LSI 9201-16e cards and that the mpt3sas driver is in use by the kernel.

I added rootdelay=10 to the end of the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line in /etc/default/grub.d/trunas.cfg and ran update-grub. I also edited the command from the GRUB screen during boot just to ensure that it was applied during that boot instance.

I also edited /usr/local/bin/truenas-grub.py and added mpt3sas.max_queue_depth=10000 to the end of the config list and ran midclt call etc.generate grub, to which I just received null as a response on the screen.

I also entered the truenas CLI and ran system advanced update kernel_extra_options="rootdelay=10".

After every change, I rebooted. I'm not seeing my drives with lsblk, nor am I seeing them listed in the SCALE web GUI. I feel like since lsblk -k shows that the proper kernel driver is in use that I should be operational and that it is possibly the administrator (me) doing something wrong.

Per one of the comments on the second thread that I listed, I tried viewing the firmware version in use, but systool does not seem to be installed, so that didn't work out.

If you guys could please provide me with some assistance here, I'd greatly appreciate it!

 

[sirEgghead]

I wanted to provide an update of what I've gotten done in the past 2 days. I did find that the firmware that was installed on the LSI 9201-16e was a later version than I could find on Broadcom's site. So I used sas2flash -o -f filename.bin and flashed 20.00.07.00 IT (P20) without BIOS to them both.

Looking through my syslogs, I can see where the cards are successfully initing (I see mpt3sas_cm0: port enable: SUCCESS and the same for cm1) and I do know for certain that the rootdelay and max_queue_depth options are persisting through reboot. sas2ircu shows my cards, but not my drives, even when directing at a specific card (sas2ircu 0 display).

Also near the end of my original post, there is a typo. lsblk -k should have said lspci -k.

I know the SC200 and SC220 shelves are just rebranded MD1200s, but I'm concerned that there may be specialized firmware on the shelves that limit the host it connects to. Not sure if this is true, but I'm not sure what else to say at this point. I also booted up another OS from USB and received no different results. Is there something that I need to do once the OS is loaded in order to have it scan? Also of note is that the heartbeat LEDs on the back of the shelves are not lit. Only the power lights on the far right. The lights next to each of the 4 ports are dark. It has been too many years since I've messed with storage shelves, but I think those only light up once a connection is established? Should they be lit before or after my OS sees drives?

I can pull some logs when I get back to the lab if needed.

Also, I have attached a few photos showing the end of my mpt sequence in syslog and what sas2ircu provides.

 

[sirEgghead]

I solved it. The sas2flash utility that comes with TrueNAS varies from the sas2flsh utility that came with the firmware. I created a FreeDOS boot disk and used the utility there to flash my firmware and everything is golden. I hope this helps someone else!