Booting Proxmox 6.4 installed on internal USB SSD of a HP Microserver Gen8

[FernandoT]

Hi Everybody,

I have been running Proxmox for more the a year now on my HPE Microserver Gen10 Plus and it is working great!
I Installed the OS on a 500GB SSD running on on of the USB 3.X ports of the GEN10 Plus and the four internaldrives are passed trough to a VM running a NAS.
Then I share the storage through NFS to all VM's and other machines etc.

Now I want to do something similar on my HP Microserver Gen8 but that has proven to be challenging.

I am able to boot and run from an HD on de ODD bay, but because I want to pass the controller to a VM, that is not a good option because when the VM starts Proxmox hangs as the VM is competing for the controller which has the drive with the OS on the same controller.
What I would like to do is run the OS/PROXMOX on a USB SSD on the internal USB port of the GEN8 and pass the controller with all drives including the one in the ODD bay to the VM, then install something like Truenas and use it to serve NFS shares to ProxMox etc. like I do with my GEN10 PLUS.
The plan was to install a bootloader on the internal SD slot and then have the OS boot from the internal USB port with the USB SSD containing PROXMOX on it.
But cant get Proxmox to boot from the USB. I managed to start it with Clover, but something is wrong. I get a PROXMOX prompt and I can login but nothing is loaded and not all volumes seem to be mounted. Also Proxmox seems to boot way too fast.
Clover only shows a weird character like a 6 and does nothing until I press F3, enter and space. (not sure which one is working but pressing the 3 a couple of times seems to do the trick).
I feel like I am close but cant figure out why clover is not booting the OS correctly. It looks like it is not mounting the volumes.

Anyway, hoping someone can point me in the right direction on how to solve this.

 

[Dunuin]

Never worked with clover but I've read some threads here where raid controllers needed too long to initialized that proxmox booting failed because the storage wasn't available fast enough before the timeout happened. Solution was to increase the timeout. Maybe something similar with your server if you say that not everything is mounted?

 

[FernandoT]

Never worked with clover but I've read some threads here where raid controllers needed too long to initialized that proxmox booting failed because the storage wasn't available fast enough before the timeout happened. Solution was to increase the timeout. Maybe something similar with your server if you say that not everything is mounted?

Hi, Thanx for the tip, could be indeed that de USB port is too slow etc.
Will look into that but in the meantime if someone knows how to do this all info is welcome.

 

[FernandoT]

Sadly this did not do the trick, anybody other ideas?

 

[FernandoT]

OK, so it has something to do with the USB SSD I am using. Installing everything on a plain USB 3GB stick worked fine, this was sufficient to test my Theory of the controller being snatched by the VM while PROXMOX is also on a disk on the same controller. Now the pass-trough went fine.
Even with the upgrade to 7.0 using this deb's:
https://github.com/crankswagon/relax-intel-rmrr/releases

The only problem is that running Proxmox on a USB stick wont take long before it wrecks the stick.
I am going to try and use a different usb drive to see if that works otherwise I will have to go the route of putting grubb on the SD card to boot and pointing to the OS on the drive in the internal USB.

Still looking for a good howto on how to do that. though.

 

[mattTHEbastard]

OK, so it has something to do with the USB SSD I am using. Installing everything on a plain USB 3GB stick worked fine, this was sufficient to test my Theory of the controller being snatched by the VM while PROXMOX is also on a disk on the same controller. Now the pass-trough went fine.
Even with the upgrade to 7.0 using this deb's:
https://github.com/crankswagon/relax-intel-rmrr/releases

The only problem is that running Proxmox on a USB stick wont take long before it wrecks the stick.
I am going to try and use a different usb drive to see if that works otherwise I will have to go the route of putting grubb on the SD card to boot and pointing to the OS on the drive in the internal USB.

Still looking for a good howto on how to do that. though.

have you been successful with a different USB? i purchased a couple samsung nand USBs about a year ago in hopes of doing something similar, now I cant find where I left off. While researching/fumbling along again I've come across your post. Hoping to save time if you've found its a lost hope