Bootable RAID10 on 9.0-RELEASE

[Ravi Pokala]

-----Original Message-----
>From: freeiron <gul at ironsystems.com>
>To: freebsd-geom at freebsd.org
>Subject: Re: Bootable RAID10 on 9.0-RELEASE
>Message-ID: <1377127128386-5837809.post at n5.nabble.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>Hi Ravi,
>
>Can you please help with software RAID 10 on LSI 9207-8I adapter with 20
>drives on FreeBSD 9.1. i am new to FreeBSD and will appreciate your help.
>Seems like you have mentioned something using with LSI drivers and then i
>might not have to use a spare drive.
>
>--
>View this message in context:
>http://freebsd.1045724.n5.nabble.com/Bootable-RAID10-on-9-0-RELEASE-tp5437
>647p5837809.html
>Sent from the freebsd-geom mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Hi freeiron,

As described in the last post on the thread (
http://freebsd.1045724.n5.nabble.com/Bootable-RAID10-on-9-0-RELEASE-tp54376
47p5452951.html ), I ended up just using the LSI controller firmware to
create the RAID10:

| When I got a chance to play with the actual hardware, I found that it
| has an LSI SAS controller which is supported by mfi(4). I ended up
| setting up the RAID10 in the pre-boot environment, then just creating
| GPT partitions on mfid0 and going from there. *Much* easier (once I
| dug up the documentation on LSI's website), works fine, and the
| interface offered by `mfiutil' looks pretty reasonable.

FreeBSD recognized my controller as being supported by mfi(4), so the
resulting array showed up as a drive named 'mfid0', which I then treated
in the usual manner in `bsdinstall' (i.e. partitioned w/ GPT, created
filesystems, etc.). The only thing that gave me trouble was that I
accidentally configured one of the servers with a very small stripe size
(8KB?), which lead to terrible performance; nuking the array and
reconfiguring it with a 64KB stripe yielded *much* better performance.
Manipulating and reporting status can be done from a running system using
mfiutil(8).

| [server:~] root% mfiutil show adapter
| mfi0 Adapter:
|     Product Name: Supermicro SMC2108
|    Serial Number:
|         Firmware: 12.12.0-0047
|      RAID Levels: JBOD, RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID6, RAID10, RAID50
|   Battery Backup: not present
|            NVRAM: 32K
|   Onboard Memory: 512M
|   Minimum Stripe: 8k
|   Maximum Stripe: 1M
| [server:~] root% mfiutil show firmware
| mfi0 Firmware Package Version: 12.12.0-0047
| mfi0 Firmware Images:
| Name  Version                        Date         Time         Status
| APP   2.120.53-1235                  Mar 25 2011  17:37:57     active
| BIOS  3.22.00_4.11.05.00_0x05020000   3/16/2011
|    3/16/2011
|   active
| PCLI  04.04-017:#%00008              Oct 12 2010  11:32:58     active
| BCON  6.0-37-e_32-Rel                Mar 23 2011  10:30:10     active
| NVDT  2.09.03-0013                   Mar 29 2011  02:35:36     active
| BTBL  2.02.00.00-0000                Sep 16 2009  21:37:06     active
| BOOT  01.250.04.219                  4/28/2009    12:51:38     active
| [server:~] root% mfiutil -de show config
| mfi0 Configuration: 2 arrays, 1 volumes, 0 spares
|     array 0 of 2 drives:
|         drive  8 E1:S0 (  558G) ONLINE <SEAGATE ST3600057SS 0008
serial=6SL195VK> SAS
|         drive  9 E1:S1 (  558G) ONLINE <SEAGATE ST3600057SS 0008
serial=6SL0XCHV> SAS
|     array 1 of 2 drives:
|         drive 10 E1:S2 (  558G) ONLINE <SEAGATE ST3600057SS 0008
serial=6SL1D7SB> SAS
|         drive 11 E1:S3 (  558G) ONLINE <SEAGATE ST3600057SS 0008
serial=6SL1GFBT> SAS
|     volume mfid0 (1115G) RAID-1 64k OPTIMAL spans:
|         array 0
|         array 1
| [server:~] root% mfiutil show volumes
| mfi0 Volumes:
|   Id     Size    Level   Stripe  State   Cache   Name
|  mfid0 ( 1115G) RAID-1      64k OPTIMAL Enabled

Of course, all that is only applicable if your controller is also
recognized by mfi(4). If not, then I can't really help you.

I hope that helps,

rp