I’m planning to buy some second hand hardware to build a new server,
I’m waiting to find a good deal on a DELL Poweredge r730xd, 12LFF, and I know I’ll have to replace the PERC RAID controller with an LSI HBA 9305-16i to have “IT access to the disk” (I don’t really understand that part but that’s what I’ve read)
In the meantime I found an HPE Proliant withe the following spec:
HPE ProLiant DL380 G9 – 15 x LFF
2 x Intel Xeon E5-2660 v3
64GB DDR4 (2 x 32GB)
P440AR/2GB
HP 12G EXPANDER CARD (727250-B21)
2 x PSU
12 x LFF
I’m not familiar with HPE servers at all, I’m gathering the P440AR/2GB is the equivalent of a PERC controller.
I want to make sure this HP 12G EXPANDER CARD (727250-B21) would be a proper HBA to build a Truenas server on it.
Though this has only 9 ports (SATA?) as far as I could see on the www, I’m not sure how the 15 LFF available would be adressed with it.
The P440 is the raid controller card, but I’d guess you can put that in IT mode with the correct “SPP” disk or maybe through the card set up or BIOS. I’m not finding too much for the expander card, probably because HP locked it behind their security like all of my Gen8 stuff.
My P420 card needed the proper SPP disk to let me get to the setting required to change to IT mode. It has 8 channels on this card so I expect the P440 also has at least 8 channels. The description of the P440 mentions that you can have more drive channels through an expander card, I’m guessing the expander splits the channels to create more drive connections, but I would also guess it halves the speed if you are using SAS drives, but SATA should still be the 6gbps speeds. Also maybe (guessing) the expander no longer allows SAS drives due to the data stream being split.
You will need to search the web to find the correct SPP disk image for your generation of server, you may be able to create an account on HP’s site and download it, or you may need to rely on the kindness of strangers. I’ve had better luck with Duck Duck Go than with Google searches for times like these.
An expander is not a HBA, it is a kind of switch for SAS (and SATA) drives; you connect it to a HBA, which does not need to be -16i to address 15 drives: A -8i, or even -4i, with the expander would do. Compatibility requirements are on the HBA; any expander should be good.
thanks for your research Greg and thanks for sharing etorix.
I’ll have to do some research to understand what those SPP (service Pack AFAICS) are really, but I guess these are softwares updates bringing some updates for the IDRAC HPE equivalent or even new material firwmares.
I just need SATA ports, 15 in total since the server is 12LFF +3 in the backplane.
I’ve understand correctly the expander just expands on the (probably) 8 channels of the P440 and provides the needed SATA ports (enough SAS ports for 15LFF ??). All good.
But as I remember for Dell PERC controller even IT mode was not considered
as ideal as having a dedicated LSI HBA.
For some reason HPE don’t seem to be as wildly used as Dell’s on this forum. That makes it feel a bit more risky to invest in.
I use an HPE G9 DL380. I boot with the on-board 440 and I simply installed a couple HBA cards in the riser. Used LSI cards are CHEAP.
You will not be able to use all 15 drives for TrueNAS in your box regardless of what you do. You will need to use at least 1 of them to boot as the G9 does not support M.2s like the G10. Saying that, I would avoid the use of an HBA connected drive for booting - that just gets ugly. Keep the HBA for TrueNAS storage only IMHO.
The DL380s are great and reliable. And quite quiet for enterprise servers. For TrueNAS, dual CPUs will just eat power. You could remove a CPU - that is what I did with my TrueNAS box.
thx, very useful.
Wouldn’t have thought of removing one CPU ~!
I’m aiming for a setup similar to yours, moving my VMs to a dedicated hypervisor. Though I couldn’t get my hands on an ESXi license, so I use Proxmox.
I want to add a fast pool to my TrueNAS instance and thought I’d need a “real” storage server for it.
But your remark on the 2nd CPU being a waste of power, make me realize my actual TrueNAS instance on a Supermicro A2SDi-H-TF (Atom C3758 8 cores) is powerful enough actually. Just not for VMs. And it’s got 12xSATA connectors natively. I could just get a better enclosure.
But Dell 730 series/HP DL380 G9 are a very good deal nowadays and these are really great machines. I can only speak for my actual Dell R640, which is my first of these kinds, but it’s really a far cry from my homemade server.
XCP-NG works fine for hypervisor, couple with the Xen Orchestra CE version for control. Use the dl380 for your hypervisor and that Atom board for your storage. I’m moving the storage for my lab to an n100 powered Truenas Scale box to reduce power and noise. ESXi (vSphere8) running on some HP T740 with XCP-NG running on dl360p gen8 servers in the “big” lab. Eventually I’ll have all mini PC for my lab, the 3x 20c/40t servers with 128GB ram each is overkill for my lab.
I did compare XCP-NG before going for Proxmox, but after a bit of reading I decided I was more familiar with KVM and that was enough to go for Proxmox.
I’m not sure what it’d bring as compared with Proxmox. Besides isn’t provided by Netbootxyz by default AFAIK, doesn’t help.
Have you tried it?
My Supermicro A2SDi-H-TF is Mini-ITX, so even though it can support up to 12xSATA, there aren’t chassis around that can receive this much LFF HDD unfortunately.
Storage is probably where the redondant power supply should be used though, so a good Dell/HPE doesn’t seem overated, especially at less than 500EUR.
But yeah mini PCs for the VMs should be just enough. I’ll have to start with the Dell R640 I have for now, see how it consumes under load, which should be light.
