Install on LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i , no drives detected

[gowger]

I'm trying to get proxmox installed on a Dell c6100 with SAS and SSD drives. The drives are all detected in BIOS but it seems that there is no driver support for this particular card and so no drives show up to the installer.

Debian installer (stretch) also does not detect them even when prompted to use the megaraid_sas driver.

I'm wondering is this card actually a bit old for these new releases?

 

[Tapio Lehtonen]

From what I remember LSI cards are well supported in Linux. But you have to create the RAID group first, then Proxmox and Debian can see the RAID disk you created.

 

[gowger]

From what I remember LSI cards are well supported in Linux. But you have to create the RAID group first, then Proxmox and Debian can see the RAID disk you created.

Thank you for the reply. I guess that means setting the card BIOS to present the disks as RAID rather than AHCI mode. I have read around though that CEPH and ZFS both prefer to have raw device access.

 

[LnxBil]

According to this link here, it does not work:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums...SAS-Controller-and-IR-IT-Firmware-and-or-JBOD

 

[gowger]

Yes in the end it seems with this card you have to use hardware RAID and it will then expose the arrays as virtual drives. It's not the ideal controller for CEPH, which is better, (faster recovery from failures than RAID) when managing the disks directly.

 

[LnxBil]

What if you just buy another controller that is known to work? We did this on our HP machines, should also work for Dell.

 

[gowger]

Yes I may well do that, it seems another upgrade worth considering would be a 10Gbe card to improve Ceph's performance.

 

[LnxBil]

Yes I may well do that, it seems another upgrade worth considering would be a 10Gbe card to improve Ceph's performance.

Yes, that for sure.

Yet the performance impact of using an SSD for OSD vs. upgrade from 1GBE to 10 GBE, the first will gain the most performance boost in a small setup. Normally, you will not write huge sequential data streams, you will write (not explicitly randomly, but in multiple files) in small blocks (e.g. logfiles, database wal/online log).