[OpenIndiana-discuss] 2x Xeon XS8600

[Timothy Coalson]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 5:32 PM, Harry Putnam <reader at newsguy.com> wrote:

> "Alex Smith (K4RNT)" <shadowhunter at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > SATA disks can run on a SAS controller no problem - they are backwards
> > compatible, however SAS disks will NOT work on a SATA only controller.
> >
> > The blue colored SATA socket is port 0, probably for the boot volume. I
> > can't see from the angle of the photo, but I bet the white colored
> sockets
> > are for SAS. Are there any SFF-8087 connectors on the mainboard, by
> chance?
>
> Googling SFF-8087 I find more than one shape of plug, so, not sure
> what they look like.  Are those just the plugs used to connect SATA
> discs?  The bigger of the 2 plugs required for each sata hdd. If so,
> there are 1 each on all discs now connected (4) and several free on the
> electrical harness.


No, those are SATA power connectors, SFF-8087 is an internal data connector
for 4 channels of SAS:

http://www.cs-electronics.com/images-large/Fem%20SFF-8087-b.JPG

This shows both plug and receptacle, the bit on the circuit board is the
receptacle, and is usually on a larger card/board, not with a cable coming
out the back.

However, I believe your board has only one SAS chip, and the 8 ports on it
are connected to the sata-like connectors, with only color coding telling
them apart, so I don't expect it to have any SFF-8087 ports.

> With the LSI HBA, if it requires it, just make each individual disk a RAID
> > 0 volume. That's how I did it with MegaRAID.
>
> Err, you left me in the ditch a ways back.  Are you saying if I have
> to do something with LSI HBA and I set discs to RAID 0, then oi will
> just see non-raid discs and I can just set things up as if each disc
> was not raided?  Also, is the setting you mention done in OI?
>

>From the info from AIDA64, I would guess that you don't need to worry about
configuring the card for RAID 0, the storage controller says "3000 series",
which from some brief perusal of lsi's site, suggests that it is the
HBA-configured version of the SAS chip, rather than the RAID-configured
version.  You'd need to look through a manual or the SAS bios to make sure,
though, as AIDA64 may not actually try to distinguish them.

More terminology - HBA means it just shows the OS the disks directly, while
the RAID version can't do that, and instead puts a layer of virtual raid
devices between the OS and the drives - ZFS works better on raw disks
because then you don't have special RAID labeling on the disks (so you can
move them to a system without a RAID card), and because ZFS itself can do
RAID-like redundancy with better integrity guarantees.  The way to get
around the second part of that, if you only have a RAID-style adapter, is
to make a separate RAID-0 device (no redundancy) for each disk, making it
close to pass-through for each disk.


> Can we start a little further back please: Is there something on this
> machines hardware that will give me problems in setting up mirrored
> whole disks for vpools once OI is installed?
>

If you can run OI at all, with more than one disk attached, there should be
no problems making a mirrored zpool, that is software, not hardware.  The
main question is how many disks (and of what size, as was mentioned, the
SAS ports will only support up to 2TB drives due to the older generation
SAS chip) you can attach with that hardware.  You could also acquire an HBA
card with a more up to date chip in it for more/larger disks (assuming you
can fit them in the chassis).


> I am posting a very detailed report on the hardware and software using
> the current (windows 7) OS and a tool called Aida64 that pulls all
> relevant info.  It generates a 2+ mb html file but I can post it on my
> web pages so not to overload this message.
>
> It also includes certain performance tests and lots of other junk.
>
> Some of the hawkeyes here will no doubt be able to make some sense of
> it.
>
> If anyone is willing to look thru that lengthy report... I guess I'll
> post it now.
>
> zeus.jtan.com/~reader/vu1/Aida64_rpt-140718.html


Something slightly worrisome - AIDA64 only finds 4 of the 8 SAS ports.  I
don't know if this means anything, I haven't worked with a similar system.


>
> (Absolutely piles of information).
>
> Further, if anyone is interested enough, I've posted some more images
> that are stepped back compared to the first two.  Stepped back far enough
> to see the whole motherboard.
>
> I had poor lighting and so the flash glare makes them a little hard to
> see, but I find if I blow up the image in whatever viewer I'm
> using... the flash glare becomes negligible
>
> Even without any special handling the images are fairly decent.
>
> Maybe some of you will recognize what all is going on in there.
>
>
>
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