Pool office After rebooting (HP DL380G10 +MSA2060)

[Huaming]

Hi,

In my firm, We'd like to build a storage area. the Arch is as below.

1. HP DL380 G10. as TrueNAS host.
* 16G RAM
* 300G *2, RAID1, Host the TureNAS OS. These 2 HDD are connected to one RAID adapter
* 2T * 6, as local storage. These HDD are connected to the other RAID adapter
2. MSA2060, as storage pool. using Fiber+HBA adapter to reach out HP DL380.

We installed the latest version of TrueNAS, we found below 2 issues

1. Those 6 HDD cannot be recognized by TrueNAS during the OS installation, until these were grouped as RAID
2. That logical pool which was built by TrueNAS on MSA2060 is offline during OS rebooting since the TureNAS installation was completed.

about #1, I suppose this is about the RAID adapter, maybe TureNAS dose not has its driver in system.
about #2, I has no clue. as this is critical to operation. Would be very much appreciated, If I can have some advices here.

Thanks

 

[jgreco]

I suppose this is about the RAID adapter,

Yes, it is. See

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

maybe TureNAS dose not has its driver in system.

If a driver is available, it's already included. It's just not expected to be usable. You need to pull the RAID controller and replace it with an LSI HBA.

MSA2060, as storage pool. using Fiber+HBA adapter to reach out HP DL380.

This is not expected to work, or at least not well. FC is a horrible choice for backend storage. For example, if your MSA chassis has 24 drive slots, and is connected to the server with a 16Gbps FC link, you are heavily oversubscribed. Modern HDD's can move north of 200 MBytes/sec (1.6GBits/sec) so 1.6 * 24 = 38.4GBits/sec needed. Your FC is only able to manage about half that, so anytime there is a scrub or resilver, your array will be overloaded and you may experience additional problems.

 

[Huaming]

Thanks for your promote reply which is very very help. Now I am sure this is hardware compatibility issue. so I will use LSI raid adapter instead. About 2#, understand, using this arch is not a good choice, since it will lead to a performance issue. However, Do you have some advice on that problem. 'pool will be offline after rebooting'. Do we need to perform a manual import after every rebooting, or using a start-up script.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I will use LSI raid adapter instead.

Don't. You need to use an LSI HBA with so called IT firmware. Not an LSI RAID card. These are two different things, although many LSI RAID cards can be cross-flashed with IT firmware.

 

[HoneyBadger]

MSA2060

If this is the "MSA2060 Storage Array" it is using its own internal RAID logic, which is bad for reasons similar to the "Don't use a RAID controller" resource. The proper component is the "MSA2060 (LFF/SFF) Drive Enclosure" which connects via 12G SAS, and would require an external SAS3 HBA in your DL380 unit.

You will likely need to include a post-initialization script to import the pool, as I suspect the FC driver/link isn't coming up until after the regular drive scan and pool importation. A full check of the boot logs/dmesg might verify that - but the supported solution is to not use an array containing external RAID logic.

 

[Huaming]

Don't. You need to use an LSI HBA with so called IT firmware. Not an LSI RAID card. These are two different things, although many LSI RAID cards can be cross-flashed with IT firmware.

View attachment 59342

Thanks for advice. I googled 'LSI HBA' which is a hardware. I will purchase one first.

 

[Huaming]

If this is the "MSA2060 Storage Array" it is using its own internal RAID logic, which is bad for reasons similar to the "Don't use a RAID controller" resource. The proper component is the "MSA2060 (LFF/SFF) Drive Enclosure" which connects via 12G SAS, and would require an external SAS3 HBA in your DL380 unit.

You will likely need to include a post-initialization script to import the pool, as I suspect the FC driver/link isn't coming up until after the regular drive scan and pool importation. A full check of the boot logs/dmesg might verify that - but the supported solution is to not use an array containing external RAID logic.

Thanks for your reply. Now I understand its logical.