[geeks] ZFS on Dell R720?

[Mark Benson]

Yeah, everything Ibm reading states the H710 doesnbt support non-RAID
modes, so your options are either a re-flash or yank it and use something that
supports AHCI passthrough.

b

Mark

Sent from my iPad

> On 4 Jan 2022, at 08:56, John Core <core.john at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> o;?It wonbt work. Yank the perc controller and order the custom cable that
> bypasses the controller and plugs into the motherboard and the drive
backplane
>
> Sent from my iPhone
> in regione caecorum rex est luscus
>
>>> On Jan 3, 2022, at 4:01 PM, David Brownlee <abs at absd.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> o;?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
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