HP P410 RAID Controller

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Deleted member 54091

Deleted member 54091

Hi all,

I got given this card but it doesnt come with battery but has 256mb ram. I was wonder if I am still able to use it.
I plan to create raid 1 using x2 500gb
 
BuToNz said:
Don't need the battery for RAID1. Tends to be used for RAID5+.
Click to expand...

thanks for clarifying. I plan to use this for my esxi datastore.

Also do you know if i wanted to use this for my freenas how i would go about displaying the drives. I read something about JBOD ?

just trying to figure it all out. I know the p410 doesnt support sata III and also i believe has problem with ssds ?

My ideal setup would be x2 240gb ssd's in raid 1 for datastore

and another array of raid 1 of x2 2tb for freenas.
 
You can set up the P410 as a JBOD. This way it will just present the drives through to the OS as if they were normal dumb drives. That kind of defeats the point of having the P410 in the first place though.

Moving this to the Servers section and there will be more people in there with experience of this raid card as it's common in vintage Proliant servers.
 
Rilot said:
You can set up the P410 as a JBOD. This way it will just present the drives through to the OS as if they were normal dumb drives. That kind of defeats the point of having the P410 in the first place though.

Moving this to the Servers section and there will be more people in there with experience of this raid card as it's common in vintage Proliant servers.
Click to expand...

thank you.

Yeah I understand what you're saying. but creating raid 1 under the p410 controller will just show one massive drive under freenas.

my other solution was to create x2 raid-0 and have freenas create the zfs raid mirror.

I was wondering if I would be able to raw disk map the drives through the p410 controller. That way it has direct physical access to the drives through the VM.
 
I don't understand what you are trying to achieve. Yes, if you RAID 1 (mirror) the drives, they will show as one big drive in FreeNAS. Why would you want to mirror in FreeNAS when you have a hardware RAID card that can do it for you?

Are you actually trying to do RAID for data protection or do you just want the drives to be dumb drives?

Is FreeNAS a VM? What hypervisor are you using, ESXi? You can do RAW disk maps in ESXi to either a dumb disk set up as a JBOD or to a logical disk on the P410. Just not sure what it is you are trying to achieve.
 
Rilot said:
I don't understand what you are trying to achieve. Yes, if you RAID 1 (mirror) the drives, they will show as one big drive in FreeNAS. Why would you want to mirror in FreeNAS when you have a hardware RAID card that can do it for you?

Are you actually trying to do RAID for data protection or do you just want the drives to be dumb drives?

Is FreeNAS a VM? What hypervisor are you using, ESXi? You can do RAW disk maps in ESXi to either a dumb disk set up as a JBOD or to a logical disk on the P410. Just not sure what it is you are trying to achieve.
Click to expand...

sorry for not being clear.

I have vmware esxi running. I would like to raid-1 my datastores.

I also have freenas running as a VM. I would like the disks I add to also be in raid-1 config. (i dont know if i do this via the hardware controller or through freenas)

Also I have concern about the sata speeds. the disks i have are sata III. will they still work with the controller.

I want to know the best config for data protection/backup


edit: i just checked freenas and they say (Hardware RAID strongly discouraged) on their hardware requirement to run the OS.
 
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As you have a Hardware RAID controller you'd be mad to just use it for JBOD, only to then RAID the disks in software.

Setup your drives in RAID1 on the controller and format it as a datastore in ESXi.
Then just add a standard vm disk to your freenas box housed on that datastore - don't worry about adding any additional RAID levels in FreeNAS.
#######

Also, there is no issue running SATA3 drives on a SATA2 controller, they will just run at a maximum 3Gb/s as opposed to 6Gb/s
 
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Little_Crow said:
As you have a Hardware RAID controller you'd be mad to just use it for JBOD, only to then RAID the disks in software.

Setup your drives in RAID1 on the controller and format it as a datastore in ESXi.
Then just add a standard vm disk to your freenas box housed on that datastore - don't worry about adding any additional RAID levels in FreeNAS.
#######

Also, there is no issue running SATA3 drives on a SATA2 controller, they will just run at a maximum 3Gb/s as opposed to 6Gb/s
Click to expand...

thank you. yeah absolutely would love to use the card controller fully.

I guess when i setup the array on p410. i can just add the disk via raw disk mapping on freenas vm and voila

Just lastly the ssd issue, I assume this controller is fine and works with ssds and same principle applies if they are sata2 or sata3
 
lixxus said:
I guess when i setup the array on p410. i can just add the disk via raw disk mapping on freenas vm and voila
Click to expand...
You could do that, but I don't know that I'd bother. I think you're best to just format it as a datastore and use it in VMWare natively.
We use RDM's at work for the additional benefits Microsoft Clustering gives us, I can honestly think of no other use cases that RDM's make sense over VMDK's.


lixxus said:
Just lastly the ssd issue, I assume this controller is fine and works with ssds and same principle applies if they are sata2 or sata3
Click to expand...
I can't imagine why it wouldn't work, I've used a P410 with SATA3 HDD's and it was fine. The fact it's SSD's shouldn't matter.
If you can, you should try and flash the firmware on the P410 to the latest available version. However, HP now only allow access to their SPP's (Firmware update disks) for customers with an active support contract - I'm certain it is available through other means if you care to look.
 
Little_Crow said:
You could do that, but I don't know that I'd bother. I think you're best to just format it as a datastore and use it in VMWare natively.
We use RDM's at work for the additional benefits Microsoft Clustering gives us, I can honestly think of no other use cases that RDM's make sense over VMDK's.
Click to expand...

The reason I was thinking of doing it that way. Is just in case in the future I decide to migrate and move my nas back to bare metal. I can just remove the disk from and import volume ?. (As opposed to a VMDK which can only be read via vmware.)

I am assuming if I create a raid using the p410 then remove the drive from the array it will not be readable in another system?

My end result is just to have performance and backup. I doubt I would go back to baremetal. I have managed to consolidate so much with esxi. I am running 5 vms including my firewall/router.
 
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Without the battery you have no write cache, and the SmartArray disables the write caches on the drives themselves, so your write speeds will be abysmal.
 
ive come across the LSI 9212-4i for cheap. would this card work better than the p410 ?
 
rotor said:
Without the battery you have no write cache, and the SmartArray disables the write caches on the drives themselves, so your write speeds will be abysmal.
Click to expand...

There is a hpacucli command for disabling this check, although I can't think of it off the top of my head :)

You'll also see an error message on boot complaining about lack of batteries.

Current firmware is available for public download from the HP site:
http://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/swd...MTX_00b8fc2277334ff486e0034ec6&swEnvOid=4024#

Can't comment on the SSP disks (I'm only using one of these in my home server), but it wasn't a problem upgrading the firmware last time I did this.
Having said that though, I go by the motto of not updating *unless* I've got a problem.

-Leezer-
 
leezer3 said:
There is a hpacucli command for disabling this check, although I can't think of it off the top of my head
Click to expand...
I have a P410, and that command doesn't work *until* you have a battery. It's silly. They don't allow you to re-enable the drive cache until you have a battery, when there is less need for enabling the drive cache.
 
How much does a battery for the card cost anyhow?

Running a NAS on top of ESXi on top of a RAID card, kinda defeats the point of going for FreeNAS (and presumablyZFS). Unless there is a noticable performance benefit, you could just let FreeNAS do the mirroring. Wouldnt be difficult to load an ESXi box, attach the drive and retreive the VMDK if you needed to - ESXi can be run off a USB stick.

EDIT: Obviously run the different VMDKs off different physical disks
 
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Be careful with the HP SmartArray cards - if you're not putting it in a HP machine, and in some cases not using HP drives - it'll throw a wobbler and either crash the machine on boot, refuse to detect drives or refuse to load it's own BIOS into the motherboard's memory.

I tried to use a P400 on a consumer motherboard and had to admit defeat as it wouldn't detect drives or allow me into the controller's management interface.
 
skyripper said:
How much does a battery for the card cost anyhow?

Running a NAS on top of ESXi on top of a RAID card, kinda defeats the point of going for FreeNAS (and presumablyZFS). Unless there is a noticable performance benefit, you could just let FreeNAS do the mirroring. Wouldnt be difficult to load an ESXi box, attach the drive and retreive the VMDK if you needed to - ESXi can be run off a USB stick.

EDIT: Obviously run the different VMDKs off different physical disks
Click to expand...

I think I'm going to go by what you said. I will stick with current setup. I might just raid my datastore instead and leave freenas using vmdk disk as it is.
 
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