SAS9211-8i looses Raid Config

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Rand__

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Mar 6, 2014
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Hi guys,

I have an issue with my testraid box, based on an LSI 9211-8i -IR , P20 (Passed through to a 2012R2 VM)

After every Powerdown, but not after a reboot, i have to rebuild my raid
upload_2018-4-17_20-34-59.png

Can't remember ever having that issues when I still played with Raid years ago...
 

Rand__

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Mar 6, 2014
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So I have played around a bit.
When I create the raid in Windows with Megaraid Storage Manager then it survives a reboot but its performance is significantly reduced all together.
As soon as I redo it in the controller its back to loose mirror on poweroff.
Very weird :/

In the end I could live with it I think as this is intended for a two node Starwind HA cluster and one pair would always be up, but it means that I have hours of reduced resilience after a shutdown instead of minutes :/
 

Rand__

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Bios/FW yes, flashed it just recently to IR and saw no errors. Have not tried different slot yet, will do
 

Rand__

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So reseated the card, have to rebuild array first bef ore I can test.

What annoys me most is, that the virtual drive is not available during that time although of the 8 drives its only the 4 mirrors that are gone.
So yes degraded, should be there with no resilience but not be gone completely from the box until rebuilt is complete (and another reboot).
 

Rand__

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Different slot, same issue

Also, i found that it looses the whole drive, so data won't survive :(
 
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pricklypunter

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Nov 10, 2015
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That's a bummer...if the card itself is losing the settings that would suggest that the config flash is not working properly. Have you tried this on a bare metal Linux box? I'm still wondering if it's an initialisation/ driver issue, although that's looking a lot less likely now :)
 

ecosse

Active Member
Jul 2, 2013
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So recently I had a problem with a RAID I'd just setup on a S2600Cp2 / Dell H700 where (SSD) disks dropped off when I put a 40GBE Mellanox card in another PCI-E slot. My existing config was on its way out so I cancelled that change and I've not had the time / guts to try it again so far. Any power hungry card in an adjacent slot? Any BIOS config to lock it down to PCIE 2.0 speeds?
 

Rand__

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Actually I got a MLX CX4 100GBE Card in another slot... Might be worth investigating on my end
 

Jannis Jacobsen

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Mar 19, 2016
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If I remember correctly, the performance with raid on that controller will be insanely poor.
No onboard cache and bbu, so it’s really not meant for raid usage imho.
better to run it in IT mode, and use storage spaces for «raid».

-J
 

Rand__

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Mar 6, 2014
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I read that bbu/Cache are no recommended for ssd raids ?
Also that card should be ok-ish for Rad 0/1 and horrible for 5 (iirc)
 

Rand__

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Mar 6, 2014
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So the issue is more complex it seems - created a datasotre on esx (i.e. did not pass through to win vm) and that one survived a poweroff just fine.
So maybe its windows... or starwind... Will have to try another win vm...