Dell R230's + ZFS via PERC

[Dean E. Weimer]

On 2016-11-21 2:00 am, Trond Endrestøl wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Nov 2016 20:10-0000, Paul Macdonald wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> We're buying a few of theDell  R230's now,
>> 
>> The R230's however, whilst having nice 4 x hotswappable bays) have 
>> only a
>> single sata port on the borard and everything goes via the PERC card.
>> 
>> ( the R220's had awful ACPI problems which muck up serial access)
>> 
>> A lot of these are single SSD systems with a few mirrored sata + L2 
>> SSD's for
>> caching
>> 
>> I've read that ZFS prefers direct access to the disks, does anyone 
>> have
>> info/insight as to running zfs via these percs?
> 
> We bought a R320 with the H310 Mini PERC last year. The server runs
> stable/10 amd64. I managed to convince the PERC to run in JBOD mode.
> The four drives are exposed as /dev/mfisyspd0, /dev/mfisyspd1,
> /dev/mfisyspd2, and /dev/mfisyspd3.
> 
> ZFS hasn't complained so far, but the mfi driver complains every now
> and then about not being allowed to run patrol read:
> 
> mfi0: 1063 (531025200s/0x0020/WARN) - Patrol Read can't be started, as
> PDs are either not ONLINE, or are in a VD with an active process, or
> are in an excluded VD

Patrol read is a diagnostic procedure it attempts to verify all data can 
be read, its probably safe to ignore the message, though it should be 
able to run. I have a couple of machines running on Dell PERC H700, with 
zfs running on JBOD setup, looks like they are successfully running it.

mfi0: 14748 (532234800s/0x0020/info) - Patrol Read started
mfi0: 14789 (532250323s/0x0020/info) - Patrol Read complete
mfi0: 14790 (532839600s/0x0020/info) - Patrol Read started
mfi0: 14835 (532854948s/0x0020/info) - Patrol Read complete

These machines are under fairly low load outside of 6am to 6pm time 
frame.




-- 
Thanks,
    Dean E. Weimer
    http://www.dweimer.net/