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Good morning my friends!

I'm tryng a solution before buy some new hardware.

So this is my situation:

I have some beautifull hp dl360p gen8 that comes with an p420i hardware raid controller.

What I'm tryng to build is a proxmox+ceph cluster for my small company. This particulary controller(after searching a lot) allowed me to convert into an HBA mode where the disks are viewed by the proxmox installer as direct attached without using the HW controller in the middle(like JBOD). This is very important for me cause ceph and zfs requires no hardware raid in the middle to properly work. So after convert to HBA everything is going easy and I can install proxmox very fast..

but my system don't allow me to set a boot order for these drives when the controller is in HBA mode. So system is installed but I cannot boot from these drives :( this remembers me 15 years ago when I was installing pci sata cards for add support to the new sata disks instead of the ide and I wasn't able to boot cause bios don't allowed me to add in the boot order the controller. So.. I was thinking on an alternative. Maybe is possible to install only the stage1 of the grub into a usb(or even better into an sd card cause these servers have an internal slot that I can use for booting small systems) and insert the path of the hba disk inside the configuration. I do not know if I said something absurd but please if possible give me some initial steps to get out of this. Many thanks

Egor Vasilyev
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silvered.dragon
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2 Answers2

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I already installed proxmox on hp server with zfs and i do install the complete os on the sd-card. The normal way ist that you install the OS on separate devices and configure then ceph or other filesystems for vm storage. proxmox offer the possibility to use zfs at boot, what is a kind of special. i think u wanne make your os redundant. But for a cluster- solution thats not important to have the host-os redundant. Many admins install it on usb or similar, because u have a cluster and in worst case your VMs make a failover. When u think of faster restore the host, then u can also search for a scheduled host backup.

So the ways are:

  1. install os complete on sd-card or usb, if it is small buy a bigger one

  2. you already mentioned it, u must use a 2. controller - maybe there is a onboard-controller mostly sata and with small cheap hdds which u can use - make a proxmox zfs install, so u do not have to buy a expensive raid-controller. u must configure the bios which controller to start first. i hope hp bios give this possibility.

Addition: proxmox support an installation on a normal debian installation. so u are more flexible with you configuration. see in the proxmox wiki!

good luck

jew
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Why you so complicate your infrastructure configuration? You have good enterprise RAID controller - why you won't to configure array?

Ok, in some situation more correct way is provide redundant on OS level (e.d. your server has not more than 2-4 disks. But if you have storage with a lot of disks you need storage controller)

Bad practics is to configure array of enterprise storage at software level.

And the last approach: you want to instal custom boot loader on unreliable flash drive without redundant. What if something went wrong and you lost your flash drive (simple loss or crash)?

Egor Vasilyev
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  • As I already wrote, I cannot configure my ceph installation without HBA settings. It will not work. the right way is to use something like an lsi non raid controller attached to my backplane but before this I just want to try this solution with usb-grub cause I'm out of budget and for 3 of these LSI cards I need about 500 dollars. I can make images of the SD and restore in a second it is not a problem – silvered.dragon Oct 05 '17 at 10:20