Preface: why on earth does Sun / Oracle default to goofy RAID HBA's when ZFS and even SVM provide superior mirroring? AFAICT there isn't a functional way to interrogate the status of RAID volumes on this HBA from the OS -- how is one supposed to monitor for disk failures? I ended up managing to delete whatever volume came from the factory via the misnamed WebBIOS. Fired up the Java remote console and fished around via <tab> and Enter until I found an option to do so. The installation guide for this card only touches on the bizarre pre-boot CLI, but a statement that the syntax is the same as the MegaCLI utility led me to a user's guide for the latter, from which I synthesized that -cfgldadd -r0[252:0] -a0 -cfgldadd -r0[252:1] -a0 -cfgldadd -r0[252:2] -a0 -cfgldadd -r0[252:3] -a0 performs the workaround of creating four degenerate whole-disk stripes that can be seen by BIOS and the OS, and thence ZFS'd. There is of course the usual uncertainty about booting off the mirror if the primary fails, thanks to the miserable legacy of BIOS. A bit of clarification of the above syntax: on SPARC hosts, commands are prefixed with "cli", and one selects an HBA from potentially several ahead of time, much like one does with ndd on certain older ethernet interfaces. On x86 hosts every command has to specify the desired HBA. I guessed that the first would be 0, and that worked. The 252 seems to be the SES enclosure ID for internal disks; 0-4 should be obvious. The moral of the story is to be very, very sure that new systems you order come with normal, non-RAID HBA's. > I've searched the web and found only others asking this, with a few hints but no answers. > > I have an x4170m2 that was purchased by someone outside the company that came with one of these pointless RAID HBA's. I'm trying to figure out how to get the thing to simply present the four disks attached to it to BIOS and the OS as-is, without RAID games, so that I can set up customary ZFS goodness on them. > > I entered a ticket with Soracle, and so far the tech's response has been that he's never heard of this card -- despite the fact that it's what the system ships with by default! > > The BIOS configuration utility presented by the card is even worse than the typical PC-oriented card: the textual interface is a CLI that's cryptic beyond belief, and "WebBIOS" turns out to only work on a graphical console, with the usual limited compatibility with ILOM's remote console utility (eg. the mouse doesn't work). I managed to destroy whatever volume it had configured from the factory, but can't figure out how to get it to pass through the disks, or even set up stupid one-disk virtual volumes. > > I tried booting diskless and using megacli, but when I grab that from Intel's web site and run it, it doesn't appear to even see the HBA. The HBA at power-on does report four attached disks. > > So, I'm hoping that someone out there might have an idea of how to bypass the onboard RAID lunacy on this card so that I can get the system installed and in production. I'll summarize as appropriate. Thanks! _______________________________________________ sunmanagers mailing list sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagersReceived on Mon May 23 05:43:47 2011
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