ZFS with LSI MegaRAID SAS 84016E?

Does anyone have experience with the LSI MegaRAID SAS 84016E?
Is this RAID card "ZFS compatible"? I.e. does it have an IT mode? I did not find IT FW for it, but maybe there is an option in the FW? If not, would JBOD work?
Also, does the card have native support in OpenIndiana? If not, would the "Solaris driver" from LSI (from 2007) work fine on OI?
I could get one for relatively cheap from a friend (without BBU...), but I would have not much use for it if it doesn't work well with ZFS.

Thanks,
-TLB

As long as the card presents the drives individually, zfs should not care.

Why are you even looking at hardware RAID cards...the whole point of ZFS is so you can use simple HBA (Host Bus Adapters) instead of hardware RAID cards...otherwise all you are doing is using a RAID card in JBOD mode which is a big waste.

Pull up the HBA adapter list on the LSI web site...the SAS2008 ones are supported well on Solaris and Open Indiana.

I think to use the very newest LSI HBAs you'll need Solaris Express 11, but don't quote me on that.

I think he's looking at the card because it's 16 ports and cheap from a friend? Can't tell if it supports I/T mode from the PDF, but you might be better off just going with a known compatible adapter anyway. They shouldn't be too expensive. Plus, you're wasting the functionality of the hardware RAID card if you use it in a ZFS system. Sell it on ebay?

raiderj said:

I think he's looking at the card because it's 16 ports and cheap from a friend?

Click to expand...

This. I could buy it from him and resell it on ebay, but he'd do that anyways ("Hey, I'd sell this on ebay, but if you could use it for your ZFS experiments, I'm going to give it to you for ~$100?").

Without the BBU (an extra ~$125) I wouldn't really want to use it as a RAID card.

Thanks for your help!

-TLB

Hello,

I'm a former owner of one of these cards, and alas it is not a ZFS friendly card i.e. you cannot load it up with HBA firmware.

It has been suggested that you could configure each disk as a volume and expose that to ZFS, but you lose so much of the ZFS functionality in terms of monitoring and reporting doing that as to make it pointless.

If you're looking for a HBA solution for your machine, and you clearly have at least a PCI-E X8 slot, then take a look at the Supermicro board. There is a new model based around the LSI2008 chipset (AOC-USAS2-L8E) which supports large disks and is fully supported by the latest versions of Solaris along with Illumos and FreeBSD. I use a couple of these cards now in my Solaris 10 server for my home media system and they work great.

The other issue I ran into with the 84016E was it's sensitivity to disks, you need disks which can be firmware flashed with TLER compliant firmware, toherwise it starts throwing disks out of the pool and running the pool in a degraded state. This means expensive, enterprise SATA drives now, whereas my ZFS pool uses 10 Samsung 2TB drives (HD204UI like the OP uses) in RAID Z2.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but I'm afraid I've been there, tried that and reconfigured afterwards.

Hope this helps.

Thanks and best wishes,

Dave

Thanks Dave!

That kind of feedback was exactly what I was looking for. The AOC-USAS2-L8E is a nice option despite the "flipped" bracket.

-TLB