[geeks] ZFS on Dell R720?

[David Brownlee]

On Mon, 3 Jan 2022 at 20:17, Phil Stracchino <phils at caerllewys.net> wrote:
>
> Does anyone here have any experience with the Dell PowerEdge R720 and
> ZFS?  What I've been able to determine is that the Dell Perc H710P
> controller it comes with does not do JBOD out-of-the-box, *can* present
> each drive as a single-drive raid0, and *can* be reflashed with
> initiator-target mode firmware.
>
> Anyone have anything else useful to tell me?
>
> (I have had such an utterly horrible experience so far with the QNAP
> Hero series NAS I bought that I'm ready to factory-reset it and return it.)

I have a somewhat similar setup with a Dell T320, with 8 8TB SATA
disks (plus one additional disk on the built in AHCI).

After trying the multiple single-drive raid0 approach for a while I
determined that the 710/710P? PERC card it came with could not be
flashed to simple initiator mode (if that has changed, then grrr for
me, but good for you :), so bought something with the same cable
connections which could be flashed to non RAID firmware - a
"Supermicro AOC-S2308L-L8I 8-Port SAS/SATA PCI-Express RAID Controller
Card". My key rationale being if the machine died I could get the
disks up and running in any arbitrary box with enough SATA
connections.

It looked a lot like https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/123864361473, except
that listing seems to be twice the price and already flashed to IT
firmware.

In my case it now probes as "mpii0: SAS9217-8i, firmware 20.0.7.0, MPI
2.0" and has been running ZFS for a little under two years with 8
drives (plus one on the onboard ahcisata), 6 in a RAIDZ2, two in a zfs
mirror and one non ZFS for boot.

I have an NVMe which I keep meaning to add as an SLOG, but have not had time.

(If you do decide to change cards, the PowerEdge may well have a
different physical space and cable connections for its disk controller
compared to the deskside T320, so is likely to need to a different
variant)

I like the proper ECC memory of the T320, but I hate the nearly five
minute wait from power on to OS bootloader start. I miss my old HP
Gen7 N54l Microserver packed with five big (for the time) disks :-p

David