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Darthtrader
Asked: 2017-01-14 04:49:27 +0800 CST

How to install ZFS on Dell Poweredge server and Dell disk array without using the RAID controller

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How to set up ZFS using a Dell Poweredge and disk arrays (DAS).

I am completely new to this and have the following questions:

  • Does the RAID card need to be configured? (e.g. virtual device)
  • Do I need to turn the RAID card off in BIOS?
  • How does the array appear in linux? Is it listed under /dev or do other packages need to be installed before it can be seen?
dell zfs dell-poweredge dell-perc direct-attached-storage

1 Answers

  1. It depends:

    • H200/300 and PERC9 (ie: 330, 730, 830) cards have the capability to work in pass-through mode, meaning that the disks can be directly presented to the operating system. To do that, you simply need to use unconfigured disks (ie: with no RAID metadata) and to avoid configuring any RAID array (VDISK in DELL terminology)

    • H700/710 cards does not have pass-through capability. As a workaround, you can configure each disk as an independent RAID0 array and build your ZFS pool from these "fake", single-disk arrays. This is not recommended, though, as ZFS really expect to have low-level access to your disks. You should be better off using a classical RAID5/10 array and formatting is with ZFS.

    • as DELL PERC cards really are rebranded LSI gear, it is sometime possible to reflash them with LSI firmware, which may enable passthrough. This is card/firmware dependant, though.

    Finally, as the backplane is connected to the RAID card, turning it off will make the disks inaccessible.

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