[SOLVED] Dell PowerEdge R220

[BJ Quinn]

I've got a couple of Dell PowerEdge R220's that are having the same problem -- I can install Proxmox (have tried from 5.0 to latest 5.1), but if I ever power off and power back on, I end up in an endless bootloop.

I can boot to the console (by booting off an ISO, getting to the "accept license agreement", ctrl+alt+f1, ctrl+c) and chroot to my rpool and update grub, but that doesn't fix it. If I try to do the recovery option from an ISO, I get a blank screen with a white border that sits there frozen forever.

The setup is a zfs mirrored rpool. I'm able to set up VMs, etc., and even reboot. But a power off seems to permanently lock me out of booting back into proxmox again. I don't get any errors or anything, I'm not sure what else to look for.

 

[BJ Quinn]

Ok, figures, it would appear that I solved my own problem almost immediately after breaking down and posting to the forum. I *think* the problem is solved by going into the SATA settings in the BIOS and setting the SATA controller to RAID mode. Neither ATA nor AHCI worked. What's odd is that I didn't notice the issue until power off/on, and up until this point, I've never been able to switch between those modes with any other OS without a reinstall. Yet, it appears to work. Marking as solved, but perhaps someone else in the future will run into a similar problem and this can be useful.

 

[Jean-François Dagenais]

Check if your iDRAC is at the latest version. From the klunky EFI system management module, there's an update component which looks to ftp.dell.com and auto-finds all updates to apply. Slow as hell, but works.

The issue with the hang seems to be related to a virtual floppy disk (fd0) which grub constantly scans for discovering the pool and instead of instantly failing, it probably takes a second to timeout (it's "empty"/no "floppy" inserted). This causes the discovery process to take forever.

Hope this helps someone!

 

[giovvv]

For the record: our Dell PowerEdge R220s produced some pretty disastrous results with proxmox & zfs and the disks attached to the PERC H310 controller, even when RAID was not configured at the controller level. Basically, it had a tendency to destroy the filesystem at boot, entering the GRUB rescue screen with no hope of recovery.

After really a lot of tests, it finally worked by:
1. physically detaching the disks from the H310 and connecting them to the motherboard SATA connector (apparently this is actually a PERC S110 controller).
2. entering the BIOS settings (of the server, not of the controller) and setting the disks to "RAID" mode (not "ATA" nor "AHCI"), but without actually configuring RAID volumes. This step requires a complete OS reinstall.
3. using ZFS RAID1.

 

[OXIB]

Hi, I have a Dell T610 power edge and a H310 card. I have 4 one TB HDs that I would like to install proxmox with zfs. Do I need to flash the firmware on the card or should it work out of the box with the info above?
Or can I just attach the 4 hard drives to the onboard sata slots and go that way?

Newbie here - thanks!

 

[giovvv]

Well, as I wrote above I had very bad experiences with ZFS on the H310, and finally I gave up and settled for the onboard SATA; this way I had no more problems. However, at least on R220 the I/O is not great with this setup. As always, YMMV.