FreeBSD & HPE Proliant DL160 Gen10

[benoitc]

Is FreeBSD supporting well HPE Proliant servers ? I have an HPE Proliant DL160 Gen10 and I am wondering how FreeBSD supports such hardware. Can sanyone share its experience whith the HP hardware? What did I miss vs using a debian or ubuntu which are supported on it?

 

[VladiBG]

HPE doesn't provide support for FreeBSD.

Currently there's only small team in HPE which test ProLiant servers on *NIX in Japan but no official software based support for RAID, Network or ILO configuration. So all configuration must be done via ILO or RBSU.

Here is the web page with the in house tests of HPE for *BSD

https://www.hpe.com/jp/ja/servers/bsd.html

 

[benoitc]

HPE doesn't provide support for FreeBSD.

Are they still supporting the hardware (next-day service) if we are using a BSD though? I think I can live with offline upgrade of the firmwares.. But if it breaks the support of the hardware that become an issue

 

[dshdsh]

I have DL20 Gen10 server. It has installed 12.2 and works fine except one thing, very noisy fans. That was the reason why I installed this server in garage instead of home.

 

[benoitc]

I have DL20 Gen10 server. It has installed 12.2 and works fine except one thing, very noisy fans. That was the reason why I installed this server in garage instead of home.

is this brcause of the drivers or it was doing the same under a supported OS?

 

[VladiBG]

Are they still supporting the hardware (next-day service) if we are using a BSD though?

Yes hardware support is not related to the OS in any way.

 

[dshdsh]

is this brcause of the drivers or it was doing the same under a supported OS?

I can't tell for sure, but I read on their forum, that it's because absence of a freebsd agent. For any fan complaints they are suggesting to install some kind of agent, which exists for linux only.

 

[VladiBG]

If you are using dynamic smart array raid then the temp of the disk are reported correctly and the fan speed should be low. If you are using AHCI the disk temperatures are reported via Agentless management service for ILO 5 which software is not available for FreeBSD and Fan is running on high speed. There's similar issue when you are using non complain NMVE drive with missing temperature reporting.

Document Display | HPE Support Center

support.hpe.com

Document Display | HPE Support Center

support.hpe.com

 

[dshdsh]

Just for imagination. Right now iLO on my server shows fan speed 34% and this is very loud.

 

[VladiBG]

The fan speed remains between 6% and 8% for all three fans from the concern of high fan speed (above 30%) once Agentless Management Service is installed

 

[benoitc]

If you are using dynamic smart array raid then the temp of the disk are reported correctly and the fan speed should be low. If you are using AHCI the disk temperatures are reported via Agentless management service for ILO 5 which software is not available for FreeBSD and Fan is running on high speed. There's similar issue when you are using non complain NMVE drive with missing temperature reporting.

Document Display | HPE Support Center

support.hpe.com

Document Display | HPE Support Center

support.hpe.com

thanks for the link. I'm not sure then if i will use freebsd then on this machine One of the main reason I wanted to do it was ZFS.
I thought that the HPE Smart Array E208i-p SR Gen10 will let freebsd correctly report the temperature even in HBA.

 

[VladiBG]

If you haven't already bought this one i would recommend to select a server with redundant power supply with hardware raid controller like P400 series and use SAS drives.

 

[benoitc]

If you haven't already bought this one i would recommend to select a server with redundant power supply with hardware raid controller like P400 series and use SAS drives.

hrm I have already one machine (redundant supply) and SAS drives but with this controller; I will look at changong it for the second one . So you mean using hardware raid with freebsd instead of using ZFS?

 

[dshdsh]

I thought that the HPE Smart Array E208i-p SR Gen10 will let freebsd correctly report the temperature even in HBA.

I thought the same and bought this controller. And yes, it reports the temperature. At least I see it through iLO. Without Smart Array fan speed was 70%, now it's just 30%.

 

[VladiBG]

So you mean using hardware raid with freebsd instead of using ZFS?

Yes, instead of ZFS use UFS. Note that for RAID 5 you need flash-backed write cache (FBWC) it's actually 72-bit DDR3 memory for r/w cache. You still have UFS snapshots and live system remote backups using dump no journal (ufs, local, soft-updates)

Here is one of my servers (DL 380 G9)
HPE Smart Array P440 Controller is a low-profile, PCIe3 x8, 12 Gb/s SAS RAID

ciss0: <HP Smart Array P440> port 0x3000-0x30ff mem 0x92e00000-0x92efffff,0x92f00000-0x92f003ff at device 0.0 numa-domain 0 on pci2
ciss0: PERFORMANT Transport

camcontrol devli
<HP RAID 5 OK> at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (da0,pass0)
<HP RAID 1(1+0) OK> at scbus0 target 1 lun 0 (da1,pass1)
<AHCI SGPIO Enclosure 2.00 0001> at scbus6 target 0 lun 0 (ses0,pass2)
<AHCI SGPIO Enclosure 2.00 0001> at scbus13 target 0 lun 0 (ses1,pass3)

 

[benoitc]

also for the record in lba mode when the controller allows hybrid mode, fans stay happily at 11%. on gen10 temperature is fetched by ilo 5 without the need of the agent according the spec (screenshot attached) .