Error rebooting Dell PowerEdge R450

[hal9008]

Hello.

We have purchased two new Dell PowerEdge R450 servers. We installed VMWare ESXi in the first one and the latest version of proxmox in the other server. The difference between the two servers is that the VMWare server has Dell hard disk drives and the other has generic drives (data center specific Kingston SSDs). Now we have 2 disks configured in raid 1 in the proxmox server

On the VMWare server everything works fine. No problem.

On the proxmox server we have had problems restarting proxmox. If we do a reboot of proxmox from the proxmox control panel (by pressing the "Reboot" button) the proxmox turns off correctly, but when rebooting, it is not able to turn on. "DellEMC" appears on the server screen (its a bios screen), but when initializing Serial ATA devices it stays at "F/W Initializing devices 42%". It stays at the BIOS screen and fails to start the system boot (It doesn't even get to load the grub of the proxmox). I have to go to the IDRAC9 of the Dell and in the "home" menu, press "graceful shutdown" ("apagado ordenado" in spanish) and then "Perform power cycle (Cold Boot)". When I do this, proxmox can boot without any problem.

The vendor tells me that possibly the proxmox reboot command does something different than the same command in VMWare. I do not rule it out, but in any case it would be the first time I see something like this.


Anyone ever happened something similar? Does anyone have any idea how this can be fixed?

 

[bbgeek17]

Proxmox uses Debian as underlying OS. The power/reboots are pretty stock. It doesnt sound like a Proxmox problem but you wont get anywhere with Dell unless you escalate it.
Another option - pop a new disk, install ESX and test the reboot. Or install vanilla Debian, which I suspect Dell supports and test that.
They will probably claim its the generic disk's fault and they dont support it. Move the good "dell" disk over and show them the results (if its still failing).

To me it sounds like a hardware/firmware issue. Make sure you are running latest everything.

---

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

 

[leesteken]

Have a look at the reboot= kernel parameter. Maybe one of the options does work for your system, until it is fixed in Dell firmware.

 

[hal9008]

Have a look at the reboot= kernel parameter. Maybe one of the options does work for your system, until it is fixed in Dell firmware.

Mmmm.. how can I configure this parameter? this can solve the trouble.

 

[leesteken]

It depends on the host bootloader. Have you seen guides that show how to add the intel_iommu=on kernel parameters? You can add reboot=bios (or acpi or kbd or triple or efi or pci instead of bios) in the same way.
It might be convenient to simple press the e-key in the boot menu and temporarily add this kernel parameter (to the right line) just to try it out.