HP P812 Raid controller.

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

RimBlock

Active Member
Sep 18, 2011
837
28
28
Singapore
I have just managed to pick up a P812 1GB FBWC for US$350 and should it turn out to be the expected item when it arrives then I will do an overview and write-up here. If it turns out not to be as expected then this thread is likely to be very short :p.

Ok, so just some quick details on the P812 (HP Part number: 487204-B21).

Chipset: PMC-Sierra SRC 8x6G SAS RAID-on-chip + PMC-Sierra SXP 36x3GSec 6 Gb/s SAS Expander
Ports: 4x External (SFF-8088) & 2x Internal (SFF-8087) (24 channels total)
Cache: 1GB 800MHz DDRII FBWC (as standard)
Raid levels supported: RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5, 6, 50, and 60 (As standard)
Host Interface: PCI Express 2.0 8x

Specs from HP available here.

Note that some people are advertising this controller with the HP part number 587224-001. This is a spare part for the main board for this controller and is not the full controller.

Apart from the price tag, I also bough this controller due to its 1GB FBWC (no need for BBU replacements) and as it is fully supported in VMware vSphere (ESXi) 5.1 and below (well 5.x, 4.x)

Current pricing ranges from US$551 -> US$1,000+ on Amazon and US$580 -> US$1,000+ on EBay. The US$350 (seller advertised on EBay and Amazon) seems like a steal and even if the 1GB FBWC is missing then it would still end up at around US$600 if I had to buy a new 1GB FBWC module which still is not bad for a 24 link SAS controller with that much FBWC.

There is an interesting article on tuning a P400 (previous gen) array here.

I have not found a lot of benchmarks or articles on the P812 but I suspect that this is mainly due to the high price tag.

RB
 

mobilenvidia

Moderator
Sep 25, 2011
1,956
212
63
New Zealand
Thats a good price for a 24 port controller, am looking forward to the indepth review not the short version :)
Basically what Adaptec use now (well PMC Sierra bought Adaptec), we need PMC Sierra to do well to give LSI some competition and push the technology.

Now if Hitman gets the 1GB H700 we should have a good comparison on our hands, similar controllers.
 

RimBlock

Active Member
Sep 18, 2011
837
28
28
Singapore
Yep, I do notice we are a bit shy on the Adaptec PMC based controller front.

Adaptec controllers are not on the vSphere HCL so are of little interest to me at this point but the HP P410/411/420/812/822 are and what with the P410s readily available, fairly cheap and upgradable they seem like a good choice. i just got lucky with the company selling the P812 (possibly a good P812 but yet to be proved when it arrives). Whilst the seller didn't have 100% feedback, the responses from the negs were that they were quickly refunded if there was an issue. The company also listing on Amazon made it easier as well as I can use my freight forwarding service to get the stuff from the US to me in Singapore at a cheaper cost and have no issues about 'no foreign credit cards' or 'no PO Box numbers' etc. I appreciate why sellers do this but it makes it much harder for us honest international buyers.

Hoping to have 3 of DBAs Agility 3s coming my way soon so can do some testing with those and maybe a handful of Seagate Barracudas.

I would like to hook this up to a machine as a FC SAN at some point linking to multiple NSC-400 NAS cases wired as DAS boxes and probably open filer but that is about out of budget at the moment ;). Maybe in a couple of months, 8GB FC vSphere compatible SAN.... maybe..... I will do another thread for that though :).

RB
 

odditory

Moderator
Dec 23, 2010
381
59
28
Yep, I do notice we are a bit shy on the Adaptec PMC based controller front.
That's not a coincidence.

with the P410s readily available, fairly cheap and upgradable they seem like a good choice.
They are not. Do not spend a dime on a P4xx controller UNLESS you plan to run it in an HP server. WAY too many gotchas to regurgitate here but someone else may feel like elaborating. Hopefully P8xx will be different since its new-gen silicon, *and* hopefully HP didn't make them a PITA to deal with outside an HP server like they did the prev gen.
 
Last edited:

RimBlock

Active Member
Sep 18, 2011
837
28
28
Singapore
They are not. Do not spend a dime on a P4xx controller UNLESS you plan to run it in an HP server. WAY too many gotchas to regurgitate here but someone else may feel like elaborating. Hopefully P8xx will be different since its new-gen silicon, *and* hopefully HP didn't make them a PITA to deal with outside an HP server like they did the prev gen.
Interesting. I recall reading about quite a few cases where people were using them in whitebox servers mainly as they wanted to use the HP expander and the Intel one was not that well known about at the time. I am sure there are some gotchas but a lot seem to be ironed out or encountered by people trying to do things outside of the specs (not including the 'dont use in non HP machines one') and possibly with old firmware. Apparently with recent firmware adn HP drivers the problems are not so much of a problem it seems. I only speak based on reading other forums and not personal experience though.

Benn0 on [H]ard|Forums has a thread on his experiences here.

Of course a lot of people are now putting them in the HP microserver and starting theads all over the place which are drowning out the whitebox compatibility threads.

Oh well, time will tell.

RB
 

RimBlock

Active Member
Sep 18, 2011
837
28
28
Singapore
Well it seems my freight forwarders in the US have now received a package from EBay (remember I bought from Amazon but the same item was also listed on EBay). Shipping was quick but then I paid for fast shipping.

Now the worrying bit.... The package is listed as Computer - Software with a value of US$80 and weighs 2.45Kg :eek:.

Best case, the P812 very well packaged...
Worst case, a CD taped to a brick :).

Ahh the joys of buying internationally...

Well it should arrive at my place buy the end of this week so we can see then.

RB
 

RimBlock

Active Member
Sep 18, 2011
837
28
28
Singapore
Well it has just arrived.

Looks like I would expect but it does not have the rear PCI bracket so that is going to be a bit of a pain to source I would guess.

Just plugging it in now and we hall see what is what.

RB
 

RimBlock

Active Member
Sep 18, 2011
837
28
28
Singapore
Plugged in and was recognised right away. Listed as having 1GB cache (not specified if BBWC or FBWC but as they come as standard with FBWC it is probably fairly safe to assume).

Put it into passthrough mode and rebooted and it vanished from the booting BIOS messages and therefore ESXi. It seems to be quite temperamental. I suspect the lack of the rear bracket is not helping as it is a full length card and is quite heavy at the back as well as at the front. I have had intermittent success getting it seen but nothing consistent. I have now pulled my M1015 and it is seen straight away on boot so I am wondering if they are having a bit of a clash.

Anyway, I have put 3x Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB drives on it and set them to raid 5. I am copying a 28GB VMDK file to the array from a 320GB Scorpio black at the moment. Seems reasonable speed wise. First I have to build or find a rear bracket (Dremel at the ready) and then I will boot to a Linux live DVD and try some testing. I have DBAs Agility 3s making their way to me hopefully now so I can take those and try a couple of raid 0 to raid 0 SSD benchmarks, Raid 5 with 5x agility and probably raid 10, & raid 6 as well.

Will see how it goes.

RB
 

RimBlock

Active Member
Sep 18, 2011
837
28
28
Singapore
Well last week was a very busy week so I have had no chance to play with the new controller.

Last weekend I finally had a go. I was finding that the controller would be detected only intermittently.

Starting Config.

Intel S1200BTL board - Original BIOS.
Intel E3-1230 Processor
16GB (2x8GB) Kingston ECC ram
M1015 SAS controller (PCIe x8 slot 3)
Intel CT network card (PCIe x4 shared slot 4)
Intel ET Quad network card (PCIe x4 shared slot 5)
M1015 SAS controller (PCIe x8 slot 6)

I replaced the M1015 in slot 3 with the P812 and it was only being detected now and then. I then removed the other M1015 and it was detected more frequently.

I then decided to update the boards BIOS, reset to defaults and start from a clean setup (no cards) and add one at a time checking that they could be seen at each new reboot.

Apart from an issue with a M1015 not being seen in slot 5, it all went fairly smoothly and the cards are all detected on reboot (cold or warm) consistently.

End resulting configuration.
HP P812 SAS controller (PCIe x8 slot 3)
Intel ET Quad network card (PCIe x4 shared slot 4)
Empty (PCIe x4 shared slot 5)
M1015 SAS controller (PCIe x8 slot 6)

As you can see I ended up sacrificing my Intel CT card but TBH with the Quad ET, two motherboard networking ports and an Intel PCI network card, I think I have enough connectivity for now.

The P812 works fine using HPs ACU (Offline mode) via HP boot disk creation utility. Strangely it would not create the boot USB drive from the ACU ISO image (not supported in this version even though the option is visible) so I had to mount the ISO and then point at that.

Booting off the bootable USB with the ACU it detects the controller and attributes fine. All looks good.

Only thing missing is the metal PCI bracket.

I am awaiting for some SSDs from DBA which are doing a bit of a sight seeing tour around the US at the moment it seems courtesy of USPS. Once they make it to me I can then look at firing up with a Live Linux CD and running some tests.

RB
 

RimBlock

Active Member
Sep 18, 2011
837
28
28
Singapore
Ok, bit of an update.

Last weekend the controller lost all the arrays. After a lot of worrying as I had two raid 5 arrays, one with all my movies etc on which I could stand to loose but would be a pain to re-rip, I found I could just recreate the arrays and logical drives and after doing one the others reappeared. All had their data so I had not lost anything.

I then went ahead and flashed with the latest SSP (flashes fine on the Intel board) but on rebooting the card could not be recognised at all in the x16 slot and in any other slot it would initialize, report the number of logical drives and the reboot the server. After a day of trying many different combinations I finally tried it in my old MSI LGA775 board I use to flash M1015 controllers and it worked fine.

I then went out today and picked up a HP ML110 G7 which I will use as a dedicated machine for my business rather than sharing the home setup and then I will share the file via NFS to the other server.

After booting the ML110 I ran the SPP disk and patched the server to the latest level. I then hit another problem... the external port do not seem to be working on the controller any more. The ML110 has only 4 bays internally so not having the external ports is a major problem. Now I do have a couple of dual SFF-8087 -> SFF-8088 brackers so I can re-route the internals external which would allow me to connect to my raid 5 arrays in my other Supermicro chassis but still not a good situation.

At least as I have the HP server now I can try HP support and see if they can help. If they are anything like IBM then they will not help unless you have a HP server serial number...

First I am going to try regressing the controller firmware to see if that helps.

Ahh, what a fun week it has been :D.

RB
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
12,511
5,792
113
Wow that seems like a not so fun process.

Really a pain that this stuff doesn't "just work"

Even Windows had the idea of plug'n'play by the mid to late 90's.
 

RimBlock

Active Member
Sep 18, 2011
837
28
28
Singapore
Regressing the firmware seems to have allowed the external drives to be detected again...

Finally put the ML110 back together and put it back int he rack and now it wont power on, just sits there spinning its fans at top speed .... ahh, almost 2am and I have been working on this since 9am.

I did notice that it specifies a optimum temp of less than 35 deg C. That is going to be fun to get here in Singapore :D.

Oh well, fresh day and fresh eyes tomorrow.

RB
 

mytime34

New Member
Aug 20, 2013
5
0
1
Were you ever able to get any benchmarks done? I just picked up a P812 for my DL320s server and wanted to see how it does.
I am planning to write up testing for my P800 and compare it to the P812
 

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
1,244
52
48
I ran the DL320s with a P812 for a while, it destabilized in esxi 5.1 so I just spent a couple hundred on the DL180G6 and moved my junk over. All has been well.

Remember the P812 and P822 use more than 25 watts. The p800 used 25 watts. This is problem since no x8 slots officially support more than 25 watts just some hp servers can do it.

ESXi mostly worked with the occasional datastore lost and stun of vm's which caused a pretty big problem.

I've got 2 or 3 dl320s rotting now, due to the cheap price of the dl180 G6. All problems with latency are gone.

So I'd say DL320s + P812 = fail, then again P800+dl320s is fail too with esxi 5.1 just too slow.
 

RimBlock

Active Member
Sep 18, 2011
837
28
28
Singapore
Due to the card not happily working in anything I had including the ML110 G7 I moved over to Solaris 11.1 and ZFS. I still have the card though.

Problems I saw were that the external ports would not see ayn connected drives most of the time but would every now and then.

I am just ordering a DL380 G6 partly based on mrkrads suggestions and with the information posted above it may yet work :). I will probably use this server as a storage and backup server with both the P812 and LSI 9202-16e plugged in.

Thanks mrkrad for the info above and the DL380 suggestion.

RB
 

sam_kearby

New Member
Oct 31, 2013
1
0
0
I have installed a P812 on a windows xp 64 bit workstation used for CT reconstruction. I go thru a TB of storage a day. The P812 internal ports work fine with xp 64 but the external ports do not detect any drives connected. Does anyone know if the external ports on a P812 will function on xp 64 or win 7 64? I work for the Navy and congress would have to ok my use of any server software. NEVER take a job for the government, the gottchas are none stop. The firmware on the P812 is 5.70. I have found version 5.78 but I have yet to find a way to flash the firmware. I am afraid the P812 only works as advertised when used with HP gear. Thanks
 

vigger

New Member
Jan 13, 2014
2
0
0
Hello!

I know this thread is old but this thread is the closest i have got to an answer after multiple days of searching.

I have a HP ProLiant DL380 G5 currently with a P800 & MSA60.
And the P800 have this annoying bug in esxi that vmware won't fix that limits logical volumes to 2TB and i need a RAID 6 on 12 2TB drives.

So i thought the p812 was excactly what i needed but i see it isn't officially supported by hp.
I hoped it was because hp just didn't wanted to support those 2 together (as with many other hardware), but after reading mrkrad's message about the wattage i no longer have a clue if this could work.

Can any of you please confirm whether this will work?

Thank you!
 

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
1,244
52
48
Throw it in and see if it works! :) I'd say it is likely ! It worked in my DL320s which was just as old as the DL380 G5 but the limitation was the pci-e 1.0 more than anything!

make sure the slot is true x8 electrical not x4 or anything less !

That's why I stuffed the P812 in the dl320S storage server, to run 12 2tB hitachi drives, I ended up having issues with ESXi and latency so I ended up moving to the dl180 G6 and it just works far better ;) plus internal 12 drives goes a lot easier on the 2U space :)
 

vigger

New Member
Jan 13, 2014
2
0
0
Thanks for your response :)

What do you mean by latency?
I really hope to stick with the DL380 G5 as i just bought it, don't like the thought of paying an extra $600 to upgrade to G6 :/