FreeNAS on HP DL380 G5 with IBM M1015 - How did you do it?

[rexpo]

I have been running FreeNAS at home on an old HP DL380 G5 with 32GB RAM for a few years now, and I'm quite happy with it - All that memory gives shockingly good performance sharing iSCSI to my ESXi server, despite the "slow" disks I have in it, all those CPU cores give great jail performance, and to top it all off, it keeps the water pipes in my basement from freezing in winter.

The problem is, that I'm still using the original P400 RAID controller, with each of my 8 disks set up as its own RAID0 device. Yuck. I need to put an M1015 HBA in my box!

So to those who have successfully installed an M1015 in their DL380 G5 (I'm hoping to hear from you, sfcredfox!), I'd like to ask, what did you have to do to get it to work? Specifically:

- Can the existing backplane be used?
- Do the drive caddy LEDs still work?
- Does the M1015 plug in to the same slot that the P400 was in, or does it go at the back of the case?
- Were 2 cables (SFF-8087 to SFF-8484) needed?
- Does hot swap (finally) work?

Basically any tips plus a shopping list would be greatly appreciated :)

Cheers,
-Rexpo

 

[bigphil]

Can the existing backplane be used? Yes
Do the drive caddy LEDs still work? No
Does the M1015 plug in to the same slot that the P400 was in, or does it go at the back of the case? Any PCIe Gen2 slot (8x electrical) will work.
Were 2 cables (SFF-8087 to SFF-8484) needed? 8087 from card, to whatever your backplane has.
Does hot swap (finally) work? Should work no problem.

 

[rstew]

bigphil;
Just wondering if you got this mod to work OK, and if so what you had to change from the original P400 array card setup?

Thx,
rstew

 

[rexpo]

bigphil;
Just wondering if you got this mod to work OK, and if so what you had to change from the original P400 array card setup?

Thx,
rstew

Sorry for the late reply here, but I only finally got around to installing the M1015 / LSI 9211-8i / whatever-you-want-to-call-it in my DL380 G5 last week!

TLDR; I simply pulled the P400 and its battery module and its cables, and installed the M1015 and its cables, flashed it to the latest IT mode firmware - seems to work well.

I'll follow up soon with more detailed answers to my own original questions, but for now I can answer your question, rstew: If I got the mod to work ok? So far so good! All my drives were recognised by both the MPT BIOS on the HBA card, and by FreeBSD (11.1), and it will even boot from disks attached to the HBA. This is what I have done so far:

• Pulled out the original P400 card and its battery module and its SAS cables
• Installed the M1015 in the same PCIe slot that the P400 was in, and cabled it up (with too-long cables) in the same cable mgmt guides that the old cables were in
• Flashed the M1015 to latest LSI 9211-8i (IT mode) - BIOS 7.39.02.00 and firmware 20.00.07.00
  
• Installed FreeBSD 11.1 as root-on-ZFS to the first 2 disks as a mirrored pair (where I manually configured boot, swap, and freebsd-zfs partitions on the disks, created the mirror zpool & necessary datasets, then finished the installer as usual)

I already knew that this DL380 G5 (with a "new enough" BIOS - 2011 IIRC) could boot FreeNAS 9 from a mirrored pair of USB keys plugged in to the 2 USB ports on the front panel, but was pleasantly surprised to see that I could also boot from the disks attached to the HBA

 

[ilium007]

@rexpo did you have any issues with fan speed in the DL380 G5 and the non-HP PCI card ?