Recommended HBA, what plays nice with ZFS

[leenux_tux]

Hello Forum,

Have been running Proxmox for a few years now in a SOHO setup, mainly for educational purposes but I do run a bunch of test systems for work as well on the same system. I use FreeNAS as an NFS storage area for my VM's, the FreeNAS system has a couple of mirrored SSD's for log and cache so works well for my needs.

So, FreeNAS utilizes ZFS, Proxmox also has ZFS. My plan is to install a HBA in my Proxmox with ZFS RAID and backup my data from FreeNAS over to the Proxmox system using snapshots. Question is, what HBA works well with Proxmox ? I use IBM 1015M's (two of them) in my FreeNAS system and they work well. I need a HBA as my Supermicro motherboard only has two SATA III connectors and I want at least three 3TB hard drives attached for the ZFS pool.

Any pointers/recommendations would be greatly appreciated

 

[jeffwadsworth]

http://www.freenas.org/blog/a-compl...are-design-part-i-purpose-and-best-practices/

 

[gcakici]

I use this HBA in which support IT mode for ZFS with Supermicro and Proxmox - https://www.supermicro.com.tw/products/accessories/addon/AOC-S3008L-L8i.cfm

 

[fireon]

I must say there is a big difference from freenas zfs and linux zfs hardware conditions. The real zfs from freenas is very sensitive for SAS/SATAcontroller. That must be a real good HBAcontroller, like LSI... What will have noticed with Linux Zfs (PVE), that this is very insensitive with hardware. Until now, every hba and sda / sas controller has worked very well and without problems. Of course. A high quality HBA controller (like LSI) is recommended.

 

[leenux_tux]

Well, I finally took the plunge and went for a Dell PERC H310 SAS PCI (uses LSISAS2008 Chipset), link to PDF specification sheet is here http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/...heets/Documents/dell-perc-h310-spec-sheet.pdf

Two reasons why I went for this one, cost (£39.99 of ebay) and it supports JBOD (NON-RAID in the manual), which is important for ZFS.

I do have one strange thing happening though, if anyone can offer some advice would be greatly appreciated. I should explain the configuration first....

Original configuration

• Boot from SSD
• 1 X 2TB for ISO's and backups
• VM's are stored on NFS served up by FreeNAS

New Configuration is identical to the above but with the HBA installed and 3X3TB drives. Weird thing is the boot process halts right near the end with this.



I can get around it by leaving the three new drives out of the drive cage (IcyDock SATA Backplane), boot up, then insert the drives, but obviously this is not ideal

Could some explain why I am getting this message and what it means ? I get the boot menu as normal, it appears the boot process is going OK then futzz.

Thanks in advance

 

[mir]

You should reflash it to IT mode: https://techmattr.wordpress.com/201...-flashing-to-it-mode-dell-perc-h200-and-h310/