VMware & FreeNAS on Dell R730 with ctl_datamove issues

[Speedemon68]

I recently upgrade a 9.3 install to 9.10-Stable. How every my Dell R730 had suffered a raid controller failure and then a system board failure. We ran into a few issues in the last week that required me to upgrade the bios, raid firmware and hard drive firmware on all 8 drives.

The system is a Dell R730, 256GB of RAM, 8 Seagate 2TB hard drives using a Perc H730p controller.

I have the raid setup as RAID10 and up until now 9.3 short of a few errors on the screen had been fairly stable. 9.10 see's each of the drives as running at 150 MB/S and the Dell tool show's them connected at 6.00 Gps. I also started getting ctl_datamove issues right before the system crashed.

I am running FreeNAS from the embedded flash cards in the server and not from 2 TB drives. I realized this when the it counted 9 drives and not 8. The hard drives are Dell branded Seagate ST2000NM0023 SAS HHD. The version is GS11.

I have 5 nics (4 on board, 1 nic for mgmt) using i-SCSI and NFS.

i-SCSI is configure for VM-Ware. I mimicked the configuration we used for a Equalogic storage array. I have 1 main address with the other three available. VM-Ware is configed based on best practices. I do see equal load across adapters. I am seeing latency under load when doing exports to file.

Any Advise with this issue would be helpful. I can provide more information if required in detail about the server.
R. Carter
Virtual Resource Coordinator / VMware Administrator

 

[Nick2253]

You should not be using ZFS on top of hardware RAID. I'll point you to this discussion about a Dell Perc card from a few years ago that summarizes, better than I can, what the problem is:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...h-a-working-perc-freenas-configuration.18222/

TL;DR: Buy a new RAID card, and avoid the hassle and problem that come with trying to use the Perc controller.