Hello all!
We have a bunch of old HP Proliant BL460C G7 servers still fully functional. Since they have quite a lot of memory and are attached to a fast storage, we're going to install ProxMox on them for development and homologation purposes.
The resumed specs are:
- 2 Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs (Westmere);
- 96GB ECC DDR3 RAM;
- 2 local 146GB SAS disks attached to a HP P410i RAID controller.
We always create a 1+0 hardware RAID disk using the two SAS disks for local installation and booting - this RAID controller is old and doesn't support HBA mode - and all the other data goes through NFS or CIFS shares to a Netapp storage.
Prior to this, I've been testing a 8.1.3 ProxMox cluster on them for months now, and all is stable and working.
But when I tried to upgrade to PM 8.2, using the new 6.8 kernel, it fails early at the install process. Sometimes it can't get past creating partitions, sometimes it fails at creating the LVM pools, or extracting the base system, or it finishes the install and crashes almost instantly after. Since it's all disk related, my suspicion is that the new kernel is not playing nice with my old RAID controllers.
To confirm that, I took those steps:
- Made a install using the 8.1.4 version (using the proxmox-ve_8.1-2 ISO);
- Configured the no-subscription repository and ran the upgrade;
- The server rebooted, and less than two minutes after completely froze with some disk errors message (they went too fast on the screen and I couldn't capture them).
- Remade the install using the same ISO (proxmox-ve_8.1-2);
- Run the upgrade again, but this time configuring the /etc/apt/preferences.d/proxmox-default-kernel file to pin the kernel to avoid it to upgrade to 6.8;
- Rebooted the server and now it's been stable all day long - and with some VMs copying large files and stressing the CPUs to 100%.
After being almost sure that the problem is related to the new kernel and my old RAID controllers, I'd like to ask if someone could help me:
- To explain how to capture logs that confirm this incompatibility (kernel 6.8, HP P410i RAID controller);
- If they exist, show me settings that can make the new kernel play nice with the controller (HP hardware experts?)
- Telling if some important functionality will be lost upgrading PM (currently at 8.2.4 on the test server) but not upgrading the kernel.
I'm willing to reinstall and reconfigure it as many times as needed if this will help the PM team to figure out , if possible, how to solve this incompatibility.
Thanks for the help and for this great product!
Luis.
