On 3 November 2016 at 04:30, Gabriele Bulfon <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm considering reusing an HP ProLiant DL380e currently running VMware, > scrathing it and reinstalling XStreamOS/illumos (VMware will be moved > elsewhere). > It features 2 hba controllers: > 1- HP Dynamic Smart Array B120i RAID controller (with 4 disks, I will use 2 > as a mirrored boot) > 2- Smart Array P420 (some TB of disks) > > I want to completely bypass hardware array raid and use jbod or similar. > I found documents around saying that I can just configure each disk as a > single array in the controller, obtaining the same effect.
I don't think this is a good idea. While it is technically possible to create a non-redundant logical volume on each physical disk, this is _not_ the same as having a proper JBOD/target-mode HBA. In particular, the RAID controller will not expose proper fault or hot-plug information back to the operating system. If you have a disk failure or other problem, it's not clear that you'll be able to pull out the failed disk and plug a new one in and have it work, at least without rebooting and possibly reconfiguring the RAID controller. I'm also not sure that we have a driver for the "Dynamic Smart Array", which I believe is a different series of parts to the regular "Smart Array" controllers like the P420. My strong recommendation is to install a real JBOD-mode HBA -- something like an LSI IT-mode card supported by "mpt_sas" would probably be best. If you're not going to do that, I would probably let the RAID controller manage redundancy on the disks, e.g. using by creating a single RAID-6 logical volume, and create a single-vdev ZFS pool (i.e. no redundancy at the ZFS layer). Cheers. -- Joshua M. Clulow UNIX Admin/Developer http://blog.sysmgr.org ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
