PVE 2.0 Installation problem solved when first installation fails

[samnco]

Dear All,

My configuration is a Dell PowerEdge R720 that comes with a dual 1GB SD card in RAID1 on the motherboard (rest being 2x Xeon E2650, 32GB RAM, 2x 300GB SAS in RAID1.

I didn't realize the 1GB of the SD cards were not enough to install ProxMox. My first installation failed saying that the HDD was not big enough.
Then I moved to installing on the RAID1 made of the 2 SAS drives. Again the installation failed saying it was unable to create VG on the system.

Looking at ALT+F2 messages I noticed it mentionned a VG was already present on the system. I made me think that the first install on the SD Card maybe created it [as vgdisplay doesn't care about the physical drive and the SD card would be seen as sdb) and that the install script would be trying to use that already preconfigured VG. With the size problem that would maybe explain the issue.

I deactivated the SD cards so they would not be seen anymore and retried. There it goes PVE installs properly.

Conclusion: if
- an installation fails AFTER the VG/LV have been created
- [TBC] At least one of the errors is that the size of the drives was unsufficient
- you try to install again on another drive
- You may have to format or deactivate the previous drive to make sure PVE can install properly.

I though this may help future users trying to install on a similar configuration. As those servers are really new I am not sure yet if bigger SD cards are available. In terms of development maybe when an install fails the script should also attempt to undo all steps that impact the system and potentially new installs (but that is maybe too much to ask, I should have checked the size earlier in the process).

Have a nice day!

 

[nick]

HI,

please can you tell me if the final install was OK on this server? I intend to buy 3 DELL PE 720 (same configuration). but with more storage...

 

[samnco]

Hi Nick,

After I removed the 2 SD cards I had no problem to install on the 300GB drives ,o). However what you might experience (I didn't try to do it again so this might be wrong...) is the SD Cards size problem. Dell assumes you're going to install VMWare. VMWare assumes you are going to add further storage later (datastores) and it takes less than 500MB

But ProxMox does it differently. As soon as you install you'll see the below:

root@FR-E4S0-PRX01:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/pve-root 69G 1.5G 64G 3% /
tmpfs 16G 0 16G 0% /lib/init/rw
udev 16G 260K 16G 1% /dev
tmpfs 16G 44M 16G 1% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/pve-data 2.6T 54G 2.6T 3% /var/lib/vz
/dev/sda1 495M 71M 399M 16% /boot
/dev/fuse 30M 52K 30M 1% /etc/pve



/dev/mapper/pve-data is not the important one: it is the equivalent of the first datastore in VMWare. However it is the "variable one": the other partitions are created, then the rest is allocated to this one.
But as you can see the other partitions are pretty big (root is 70GB, udev 16GB) which means that they won't fit on your 1GB SD Cards. This is confirmed by scanning the LVs:

--- Logical volume ---
LV Path /dev/pve/root
LV Name root
VG Name pve
LV UUID oW9525-Z21V-pDwy-Qz21-LlrK-2mfY-qOlEax
LV Write Access read/write
LV Creation host, time proxmox, 2012-07-12 17:16:10 +0200
LV Status available
# open 1
LV Size 69.50 GiB
Current LE 17792
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
- currently set to 256
Block device 253:0

And this one is created by default by the installer.

So my advice if you want to fully use your R720 systems:
First option: you install a debian squeeze netinst "as you like" on the SD Cards, and you install proxmox 2.1 from there. You'll be able to control what and where it is installed more easily and bypass the size problem. That may very well be the best option as Squeeze installs like a breeze on R720.
Second option (longer): take a "trashable computer" to install native proxmox 2.1 from ISO. Then resize / move / remap stuff to secondary partitions so that it fits on your SD Cards (R720 can take up to 8GB in those flash drive I think). Then make a disk image of that install and copy it to the SD Cards. See what happens.



That is all I can tell with my current knowledge. Let me know if that helps/you need further information...

Sam

 

[nick]

very interesting tests! in 2 weeks I hope I will receive the devices. I will remember your advices and make some tests! I will post the results!

 

[nick]

Hi Sam,

please can you tell me if your system use this RAID controller (PERC H710 Integrated RAID Controller, 512MB NV Cache, Low Profile) or another one...