Installing 11.2 U6 on HPE Microserver Gen10 ultra slow

nbbb

Dabbler
Joined
Oct 1, 2019
Messages
14
hi,

i have been reading through past forum posts about the HPE Microserver Gen10 and after some initial problems people seemed to have success installing FreeNAS. i bought one and now i'm stuck at installation.

hardware:
HPE Gen10 3216 8GB RAM.
BIOS version from august 2018, this is supposed to be the most recent one.
UEFI boot mode (seems to work)
No hard disks mounted yet.
Three USB sticks in total: Toshiba 32GB USB 3.1; Kingston 32GB USB 3.1; No-name 16GB USB 2.0

i was able to get the initial boot medium to boot from USB and access the console after setting the boot options like this:
set hw.pci.realloc_bars=1
this worked only with the USB 3.1 sticks, the USB 2 stick failed at mounting iso9660://<something>

in the next step, i am trying to install the system onto a USB stick. this almost works, but it's ultra slow. i'm seeing exactly the symptoms described here:
https://www.ixsystems.com/community...ailed-multiple-times-middlewared-error.73952/

i tried various combinations of different USB sticks, so far no luck getting it to work at tolerable speeds. the installation does work eventually, but booting then takes many minutes, and i get errors about middlewared not loading.

in the thread above, the solution was to use a USB 2 stick in a USB2 socket; i just tried this with the no-name stick, but the installation is again taking more than 1h.

is USB generally unreliable for installing FreeNAS? i though this was the recommended method? it's really hit and miss for me. i want to install to USB since i would like the only non-HDD SATA port to be for a DVD rom.
 

nbbb

Dabbler
Joined
Oct 1, 2019
Messages
14
the latest install to a USB2 drive did not improve things; the boot process hangs for several minutes at "trying to mount root from zfs:freenas-boot/ROOT/default [] ..." as linked above.

i noticed that the BIOS has settings for tweaking the USB behavior. they are called something like "XHCI handover" and "EHCI handover" and are described as workarounds for some operating systems. i tried playing with these but no success.
 

nbbb

Dabbler
Joined
Oct 1, 2019
Messages
14
pps. really i should have written "installation fails" as i can't get a functional FreeNAS system so far. the middlewared warnings result in a multitude of errors during boot, and when the boot process finally completes, i don't trust that the system is working fully.
 

nbbb

Dabbler
Joined
Oct 1, 2019
Messages
14
does anyone have a good suggestion what i should try? do i have to buy a SATA SSD or is there hope to get it running from USB?
 

nbbb

Dabbler
Joined
Oct 1, 2019
Messages
14
No; I worked around it by using a borrowed 2.5'' SATA SSD for the boot device. This is not ideal as it takes away one of the SATA slots, and 100 of the 120GB of the SSD go unused. I suspect that the USB driver in FreeBSD can't cope with some newer USB sticks, as OpenMediaVault was able to install to my sticks with no major problems. I'll probably end up getting a M.2 PCIe adapter and a small M.2 SSD for the boot device when I need the SATA bay.
 

twofish

Cadet
Joined
Nov 20, 2017
Messages
3
I had the same problems when moving from Unraid to Freenas. I have a HPE Microserver Gen8. Unraid had no problems with booting from the usb2.0 port, and the same with Freenas a few years ago. No issues at all.
But the latest version 11.2-U6 was very slow. The installation took an hour and booting the os was also very slow and gave me errors described here.
After a few changes i got the server booting from an SSD and everything is perfect. Might have been a bootloader issue, grub vs the new one.
 

nbbb

Dabbler
Joined
Oct 1, 2019
Messages
14
are you booting using uefi boot mode or bios ("legacy") boot mode? i tried both but it did not seem to change much. right now i don't have a monitor around anymore so i can't easily do bios adjustments.
 

twofish

Cadet
Joined
Nov 20, 2017
Messages
3
Mine does not suppoert uefi so i have to use bios.
I added a pci sata card and and use this for the harddrives and use the internal port to boot from an ssd.
 
Top