Upgraded my home server from Intel to AMD. Virtual disk stuck in degraded/unhealty state.

[RamGuy]

Hi, there!

Today I upgraded my home server from Intel Xeon E3-1275v1 on a Asus P8E-E/4L motherboard over to a AMD Ryzen 3900X on a Asus Pro WS X570-ACE motherboard.

I'm still using the same LSI MegaRAID 9211-8i in IT-mode for my 8x Seagate IronWolf 10TB disks, and I also had to carry over a Intel i350-t4 NIC as the on-board Intel I211-AT just refuses to work with Windows Server 2019.

I cloned by installation from my previous Samsung 850 PR0 256GB over to my new Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB. Booted up, and everything was fine and dandy besides a few drivers which I had to install.


My only issue is with my virtual disk on my storage pool. My storage pool consists of 8x Seagate IronWolf 10TB and 2x Samsung 850 Pro 1TB drives. The virtual disk is a mirror with tiering, so the 2x Samsung 850 Pro's are used for write-back cache up to 100 GB.

The virtual disk attaches, all the data is there and it behaves as normal but the server keeps complaining about the virtual disk being unhealy reason unknown. Repair-VirtualDisk just hangs for a few minutes without doing anything. Detaching and reattaching doesn't do anything.

Health on each individual drive is okay. Health on the storage pool is okay, health on the filesystem running on the virtual disk is okay.

It's rather hard for me to pinpoint what exactly is wrong as Windows Server 2019 isn't really telling me anything. The virtual disk reports: Unhealthy: Unknown and it's also reporting Provisioning: Unknown, Operation Status: Unknown, Storage Layout: Blank.

If I go into details on the virtual disk it says OperationalStatus Value 53284 which isn't telling me much. ParityLayout: NonParityBasedLayout. PhysicalDiskRedundancy: 0. Redundancy: Blank.


There is obviously several things wrong in the listings here. I suspect the issues are related to the fact that my 2x Samsung 850 Pro 1TB's are no longer residing on a Intel SATA-controller using the Intel Intel SATA AHCI Controller drivers, but are now residing on a AMD-controller using the Microsoft Standard SATA AHCI Controller drivers.


I figured the best thing would be to use EaseUS and clone the virtual disk onto another drive, redo the storage pool and virtual disk and clone it back again.

But do any of you have any experience with this? Shouldn't you be able to move a Windows Storage Space / Storage Pool and virtual disk from one server to another?


Best regards,
Thomas Andre aka RamGuy

 

[ari2asem]

maybe stupid suggestion. try windows 10.

or...do clean install of server 2019, meaning not cloning old server installation with old hardware drivers...just clean install server 2019...plz, try it and keep us updated with your progress

 

[RamGuy]

Same after a clean install.

 

[ari2asem]

can you backup yor data to another hdd or place?

if yes, then make a backup of your files.
- delete all your pool configurations (cache etc etc etc)
- install windows
- put the backup back on newly hardware and newly created pool

 

[RamGuy]

Im currently doing a disk/partition backup using EaseUS To-Do Backup to an external drive so Im going to completely redo the storage pool after its done. It does seem like its fully functional, but there is no way Im going to risk using it when Server Manager is no longer reporting it to have any kind of redundancy.

EDIT: Its not longer being reported as unhealthy, so its looking much better but Server Manager is still saying provisioning unknown and when I check the information Server Manager can no longer tell me whether I have parity or anything on it so it seems much safer to copy the data (will take a few days...), nuke it and set it up from scratch and copy the data back.

 

[ari2asem]

any progress with your setup?

 

[RamGuy]

Thanks for asking! It seems like AMD Ryzen isn't the most mature platform to work with so had to solve a lot of issues.. But I finally managed to stabilise it. I couldn't use EaseUS To-Do Backup either as it was unable to backup my 18TB of usage space on my 40TB virtual disk due to the use of Windows Server 2019 De-duplication so it insisted on it needing to take backup of the entire 40TB's ...

Ended up using TeraCopy with xhash verification. Re-created the Storage Pool and virtual drive and copied everything back. For some reason uTorrent refuses to reload my resume.dat so all my torrents are gone but that's not a huge issue.

After re-creating everything I noticed that it seems like Windows Server is just terrible at giving you the correct information when running four column mirror with a two column mirror ssd for caching. Even after recreating it it's still reporting provisioning unknown, it doesn't tell me that I have any parity or anything so I guess this is just a result of having the fast tier with 2 columns and the slow tier with 4 columns on the same virtual disk it makes all confusing for Windows Server so it's just incapable of giving you any valuable information.

 

[RamGuy]

Thanks for asking! It seems like AMD Ryzen isn't the most mature platform to work with so had to solve a lot of issues.. But I finally managed to stabilise it. I couldn't use EaseUS To-Do Backup either as it was unable to backup my 18TB of usage space on my 40TB virtual disk due to the use of Windows Server 2019 De-duplication so it insisted on it needing to take backup of the entire 40TB's ...

Ended up using TeraCopy with xhash verification. Re-created the Storage Pool and virtual drive and copied everything back. For some reason uTorrent refuses to reload my resume.dat so all my torrents are gone but that's not a huge issue.

After re-creating everything I noticed that it seems like Windows Server is just terrible at giving you the correct information when running four column mirror with a two column mirror ssd for caching. Even after recreating it it's still reporting provisioning unknown, it doesn't tell me that I have any parity or anything so I guess this is just a result of having the fast tier with 2 columns and the slow tier with 4 columns on the same virtual disk it makes all confusing for Windows Server so it's just incapable of giving you any valuable information.

 

[mblataric]

Hi, there!

Today I upgraded my home server from Intel Xeon E3-1275v1 on a Asus P8E-E/4L motherboard over to a AMD Ryzen 3900X on a Asus Pro WS X570-ACE motherboard.

Hi, not really related to your original question (which you solved, I'm glad), but this is the only thread of someone trying to use 3900X, Asus WS X570 and Server 2019

What I am wondering - did you manage to install all drivers?
Asus offers ZERO support for Server 2019 for this board - even when they are marketing it as "Pro" and "Workstation".
I managed to hack Intel LAN driver (which I really shouldn't on such board), but I still have several PCI devices without driver listed.

I'd appreciate any hints on how you tackled this.