PERC H200 and JBOD

[mygeeknc]

I have a 9.2.1.5 install running on a PowerEdge FS12-TY C2100 with a PERC H200 controller. In my ZFS Volume Manager, I have a ada drive and several da drives. The machine has one hd as the OS drive, and 6 WD Red SATA drives, and one SSD that I was going to use a ZIL drive.

My question is about the mixture of ada and da drives. Is this normal? cyberjock had mentioned something about JBOD but I believe the drives wouldn't show at all if that wasn't setup correctly. I will also say that I have not made any changes to the RAID controller, is there something i should be looking for?

Thanks.

 

[dlavigne]

Did you ever find an answer to this?

 

[mygeeknc]

Not exactly. It seems that everything is running fine with it this way.

 

[crisman]

Not exactly. It seems that everything is running fine with it this way.

Hi,

I've a system with the Dell PERC H200 and had to flash the controller to work has a HBA in IT mode for drives being seen has JBOD.
Could you see your drives individually without flashing the card?

 

[m4rv1n]

I found an offer for the same system, c2100 with H200. My doubt is about this card: the card is 8 ports but the server have 12 HDD's slot. How can this card manage all disk? Or the server have other card inside?

 

[HoneyBadger]

The C2100 uses a SAS expander backplane (unless specifically configured as 1:1) so it will work fine.

Flash the H200 with P16 compatible firmware to ensure compatibility with the FreeNAS 9.3 mpt driver, and leave all drives unconfigured; it behaves as an HBA if no RAID is set up.

The drives on the H200 attach as daX as observed by others, adaX is reserved for the onboard SATA ports.

Minor edit; get the onboard/mezzanine slot H200 if possible as this frees up the second PCIe slot for more network ports, FC, or NVMe SLOG.

 

[m4rv1n]

I go to bring my c2100 this day so I will work to move my freenas installation from another server to it.
Is needful to flash the H200 to work as hba or it work as hba if you don't configure it?
Have I to do any other activity?
Thank you

 

[jgreco]

If it claims it's running in IT mode on firmware 16, you're fine. If not, it needs to be flashed to IT mode.

 

[HoneyBadger]

If it claims it's running in IT mode on firmware 16, you're fine. If not, it needs to be flashed to IT mode.

Here's a link to the rather convoluted process of going to pure LSI firmware on the H200/H310

https://techmattr.wordpress.com/2013/08/30/sas-hba-crossflashing-or-flashing-to-it-mode/

LSI P16 firmware is here - If the link doesn't work you can pull it from the LSI site under model SAS 9211-8i, you'll need to use their search to download legacy versions as by default it gives you P20.

 

[m4rv1n]

Here's a link to the rather convoluted process of going to pure LSI firmware on the H200/H310

https://techmattr.wordpress.com/2013/08/30/sas-hba-crossflashing-or-flashing-to-it-mode/

LSI P16 firmware is here - If the link doesn't work you can pull it from the LSI site under model SAS 9211-8i, you'll need to use their search to download legacy versions as by default it gives you P20.

Hi, finally i've got this server with days of delay.
In a first run, with original firmware, the controller pass all disk without raid but with smart information; I can make a raid if I want (sure not now).
The server work well and pass all information to freenas, freenas only show a warning because firmware release 2 don't matched the driver release 16 present in freenas.
I did the flash procedure as your link and updated my H200 to sas9211-81 P16 , so to IT mode. The controller work perfectly and no more warning on freenas ;)
Thank you!

 

[Ericloewe]

firmware release 2

2? Holy crap, that's ancient. Even SAS3 is already at 3 or 4 (maybe 5 on some platforms). If you meant 20, it's also a good thing that you flashed the correct firmware, since stuff is known to fail hard with P20 firmware and the P16 driver.

 

[m4rv1n]

2? Holy crap, that's ancient. Even SAS3 is already at 3 or 4 (maybe 5 on some platforms). If you meant 20, it's also a good thing that you flashed the correct firmware, since stuff is known to fail hard with P20 firmware and the P16 driver.

The server arrived with H200 and original firmware in version 2 (see attached). It's old, sure, but I try to switch on and access by freenas and it works witouth problem. After this test, I've flashed the P16, so now firmware is 16 and driver also 16 ;)

 

[Benjamin Krajmalnik]

Just as a FYI. I attempted to crossflash my H200 following the different procedures which I found online, but was unsuccessful in installing the LSI firmware. I had it crossflashed with the Dell 6GBPSAS (IT) firmware, but the driver version is not the recommended one. I was unable to flash the 2118it P16 firmware, utilizing a multitude of sas2flsh versions as well as attempting to first crossflash to different LSI phases. After much searching, I stumbled across a link to a prepackaged set of LSI utilities s (http://files.laptopvideo2go.com/hdd/lsi_dos.zip), among them lsiutil. Whereas all versions of sas2flsh complained about one issue or another which prevented me from loading the firmware, lsiutil did it flawlessly. You can find the particular utility for all OS versions (http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public...st Bus Adapters Common Files/LSIUtil_1.62.zip). My H200 is now totally identified as a LSI controller after using lsiutil, and is working flawlessly.

 

[Aaron Ryan]

I had similar issue getting a H200 flashed. What worked for me was using the sas2flsh that came with the latest dell firmware for the DELL 6Gbps HBA, but using the P16 firmware from LSI.
sas2flsh from lsi would always complain that the card was not IT, and fail firmware upgrade.

I created a bootable usb using rufus
then put the Dell 6Gbps firmware in the \dellh200 dir and the lsi in the \p16 dir.
then boot from the usb and run the following:

c:\dellh200\sas2flsh -o -e 6 (sometimes I has to do this twice)
c:\dellh200\sas2flsh -o -f c:\dellh200\6gbpsas.fw
c:\dellh200\sas2flsh -o -f c:\p16\2118it.bin -b c:\p16\mptsas2.rom​

When doing the p16 firmware, the Dell "sas2flsh" will say:

NVDATA Product ID and Vendor ID do not match.
Would you like to flash anyway [y/n]? y
​

Reboot and you will now have a LSI 2911-8i in IT mode!

 

[Benjamin Krajmalnik]

Aaron,
In my case the sas2flsh from Dell did not give me that option. It did once, but the flash failed for some reason, and then it would not an longer.
Using lsiutil bypassed this, just when I thought I was going to need to get a different card.
Running the box through torture tests right now, and everything is working great.