Got a free server to replace my current one

[Jason Hamilton]

Hey Everyone,

First and foremost happy holidays to all of you wonderful people. So for the last 2 years I've been running with a 12bay supermicro. While I've been mostly happy with this box there is 1 thing that I am not happy about that is its ram. It takes the special ECC (I can't remember what its called off hand but its expensive) so the most I've been able to put in my 17TB NAS is 24GB.

So yesterday at work I was offered a Dell C2100. While yes an older box I was able to slap 96GB of ram into this sucker (and I can add more if I want). It came with 12 SAS drives all at 450GB which I intend to put to work in my other Dells.

So I want to move all of my drives from the super micro into the dell. The Dell has the LSI 9260-8i in it. Which from what I understand is not a true HBA and there is no way to flash it over to IT mode. If this is not correct please let me know.

So now I'm getting ready to order a IBM ServeRAID M1015 since as I've read in numerous posts both here and elsewhere it is capable of being flashed into IT mode which will then let me do true JBOD and let FreeNAS control my disks just like they are now.

I would love to just take the 3ware card out of my current box and move it but the back planes are completely different since the SuperMicro only does SATA while the dell is SAS.

I guess the reason why I'm posting this, is there anything I should be aware of? I know that @cyberjock had a long thread with a gentleman who was going to put the 2100 to work in an enterprise environment for vmware and stuff. Mine is just my home storage box so I'm not terribly concerned about write/read speed. I don't stash any of my VMs on here I let them just stay on their local disks. I mainly just use this for our movie library, music and pictures as well as whatever else I feel like tossing in there. I have a few iscsi mounts as well (mythtv works great with iscsi) So I apologize in advance for any ignorance on my part believe me I've spent the better part of last night and today reading up on the LSI card and hoping to find a thread where someone did actually flash it but using the sas2flash utility in FreeNAS on the new box with the -listall it doesn't even see this card. I do know that the card is there as lspci does show it to me. But if I can't make this function as a true HBA like everyone on the forum says that it needs to do then it does me no good. Especially since I really don't want to have to restore 13TB worth of data back to the NAS. I'd rather just take the drives put them in restore my config and be back to work.

Thank you all in advance for your help with this and I can't wait to put this sucker to work.

 

[melloa]

So now I'm getting ready to order a IBM ServeRAID M1015

Those are excellent. It's what I use in one of my home made servers here.

I did play with an old dell running Perc 6/i and, in this case, flash wasn't a problem, so am running it with existing cables and hardware for my hot swap.

The only concern I'd have is if you can do the same with the M1015 on your c2100.

 

[Jason Hamilton]

Thank you for the vote in confidence there @melloa I did manage to find the card from someone in Kansas and since I'm in Colorado I'm hoping that it gets here soon. I got the shippment notification yesterday but it just appears that they've printed the label for it and don't have it in the mail yet so looks like it might be a project for me to do next week. I am looking forward to getting off of this SuperMicro. I actually lied it only has 16GB of RAM in it and all the slots are full so I know that my FreeNAS will enjoy having the room to stretch out a little bit in the 96GB. I am planning on flashing the card directly in the server. I have the DRAC (not iDRAC) setup on it so I can access the console through a browser (that was another reason I'm looking forward to the move since the super doesn't have any ilo type device). Being able to just do everything local is nice instead of having to climb into my crawlspace.

Now I just hope that the disks that I'm going to move are actually true JBOD and not fake. FreeNAS does see them as daX and it is getting all the SMART data through the 3ware card so I hope that this will work as just a straight export/import.

The only problem I'm having on the new box at the moment is that once it starts up and I upload my config backup to it, the console screen gets the TTY timeout error on it where the screen just constantly refreshes. I think that this is due to my network config being reloaded. I have 5 VLANs on my FreeNAS and of course the interface names changed the super they're labeld as emX and on this dell they're igb0X. So I need to see if I can either just dump the network config from it and set it up manually or something. Recreating the VLANs isn't that big of a pain compared to setting everything else back up.

 

[melloa]

Have my fingers crossed ... by the way ... you do have back-ups, right? :D

 

[Jason Hamilton]

Yeah everything is backed up to CrashPlan so worst case I'll have all my crap back in a month or so lol depending on how fast I can d/l it all. Or I pay the piper and have them ship it to me

 

[mattbbpl]

" so the most I've been able to put in my 17TB NAS is 24GB. "
That seems like a darned decent ratio. Why do you feel the need for more?

 

[Jason Hamilton]

@mattbbpl I actually lied it only has 16GB and it really struggled to run some jails. The memory graph in the webui is always showing that its running at max with little to no wiggle room. From what I've read we should have some free space in the memory.

 

[Jason Hamilton]

Finally got my new card in today. After some trial getting a USB drive to boot up some freedos I finally got my card flashed over to IT mode. Now I'm starting the fresh FreeNAS install and preparing to restore my configuration. Once my config is all good to go I'll start my drive swap.