Hardware RAID or OMV RAID on HP Gen8 Microserver

  • Hey Everyone,


    Im planning to turn my current media server into a OMV box


    I am currently running ESX, but playing to do a baremetal install for OMV


    I have 2 3Tb and 2 4Tb drives, should I create two RAID Disks with the HP hardware RAID, or just present the disks to OMV and create the RAID setup there ?


    Thanks

  • It's not real hardware raid, so you probably won't get much benefit, although you will be able to boot from it if you use the built in raid controller but then you will need to do some work as OMV will take the whole partition on install.
    These servers don't boot from a 5th drive on the optical port but can do if you use the USB boot method, if you have data on the drives already be very careful!!



    Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

  • I had trouble with the SD card method, I was using monitoring and after some time the server would lock up, need a hard reboot and the monitoring data would all be lost
    See my posts for the issue, you may be ok if you do not use monitoring / graphs



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  • I had trouble with the SD card method, I was using monitoring and after some time the server would lock up, need a hard reboot and the monitoring data would all be lost
    See my posts for the issue, you may be ok if you do not use monitoring / graphs



    Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


    Did you have the plugin for SDcards\USB installed ?


    Unless you run a business and need business continuity (AKA availability) I would say neither nor. :)


    You say that, but after losing data previously from failed disks, its a pain to get everything back, I would rather have the RAID

  • You say that

    Well, this is just another opinion survey, isn't it? :)


    after losing data previously from failed disks, its a pain to get everything back, I would rather have the RAID

    If you suffered from data losses you should IMO start to think about data protection, data safety and maybe also a little bit about data integrity (backup, backup, checksummed filesystems, backup, regular scrubs, snapshots, backup and... backup). If you took care of these aspects then maybe start to think about availability (RAID).


    It feels somewhat weird having to repeat in 2017: RAID is not for data protection/safety (backup) :(


    Wrt SD card and OMV: This is something different than ESXi on SD card since with ESXi it's more or less read-only operation. With OMV it depends and if you use flashmemory plugin wear out of an SD card or USB thumb drive is a lot delayed (especially since way lower write amplification). And since OMV base is a plain Linux everything that works on every Linux also works here (eg. using symlinks to move 'hot spots' away from SD card to spinning rust or analyze block device usage by monitoring /proc/diskstats or checking IO activity at the filesystem layer with iostat or iotop)

  • Yes I used the plugin it made no difference

    If this report is what you are referring to then you had neither an issue with folder2ram plugin nor OMV but most probably just used a counterfeit SD card faking a higher capacity -- typical symptom is 'everything that has been written since... is gone'.


    Counterfeit SD cards are still an issue but it's easy to test for faked capacity. Though these days the fraudsters produce more and more cards that show real capacity, even behave nicely when using them with sequential IO loads but then fail earlier as their genuine counterparts.

  • I doubt that's the case but thanks for the input, I used a different card and it also exhibited the same behaviour, different card, different manufacturers etc.
    Anyway, i switched back to an SSD so it's a moot point now.

  • Anyway, i switched back to an SSD so it's a moot point now.

    Huh? @ravennoir wants to reuse his existing SD card. If that's a counterfeit card he will run into exactly the same problems like you (still not related to folder2ram or OMV).


    The link above was there for a reason: 'I recently got about 20 64GB Micro SD cards for some project at various online sources (eBay, Ali, etc). 17 of those cards are fake.'


    17 out of 20 SD cards bought at the wrong sources (eBay, Aliexpress -- and you can add to this list every other online site selling cheap) show FAKE CAPACITY and trigger exactly the problem you ran into. That's a whopping 85% counterfeit cards this single individual bought.


    ALWAYS test SD cards prior to usage with either F3 or H2testw -- if it's a counterfeit card you can still use it to boot a device (the ESXi use case -- but then check last paragraph here first) but you will for sure run into trouble as soon as you want to store data on this thing that exceeds its real capacity.

  • I don't buy from eBay or Ali, only from my memory.co.uk I don't buy cheap either, I'm also not sure where the fake card idea came into the conversation as the op wants to use a card that is already in use , no mention of size, make, manufacturer etc... My message was around issues I saw with my cards in this particular server using monitoring, once I turned off monitoring the server ran for months no problem... I didn't blame a plugin or the OS or OMV I merely stated an issue I had.

  • I suppose the moral of the story in your case is, don't buy cheap cards from less reputable dealers ....

    No but I also don't know how it could help to repeat the same thing over and over again: ALWAYS test SD cards prior to usage with either F3 or H2testw.

    You get fake cards EVERYWHERE since they are inserted into the supply chain early.


    I have brought a new "known brand" card, Ill see how it goes

    Good luck, almost all 'known brand' cards are crap anyway, only exception are those from the few manufacturers that produce their own NAND flash dies, own controllers and assemble this stuff to retail products. There's a reason why we (Armbian teaming dealing all day long with 'software issues' that are in reality just symptoms of SD card crappiness) wrote stuff like this: https://docs.armbian.com/User-…#how-to-prepare-a-sd-card -- since almost no one is aware of the fake SD card problem and what a difference exchanging an average let's say Kingston SD card with a good Samsung EVO/EVO+ or SanDisk Extreme Pro/Plus can make (SanDisk/Samsung being +100 times faster if it's about random IO with small block sizes which is exactly the write pattern on an OMV rootfs).


    But let's stop now, it gets boring to repeat facts again and again. It obviously doesn't work wasting my own time to save others from wasting theirs :)

  • Of course your info is good, in my case I only use Samsung or sandisk from my memory, I am pretty sure they are genuine but with out full and proper testing I cannot tell

  • in my case I only use Samsung or sandisk from my memory

    A web search for 'counterfeit fake samsung evo' or something like that will result in a disturbing read. The problem these days is that the fraudsters are getting better and better and unlike in the past today fake cards even look genuine. There's really no alternative to testing flash media directly after purchase or once you ran into problems (applies to USB thumb drives too of course, even SSDs can be faked today --> web search for 'fake evo 850' as an example).


    In case you have your SD cards it would be worth a try to test them for fake capacity and update the original thread then. Since what happened to you is exactly the 'fake capacity' symptom and of course flashmemory plugin can't help here since the at the moment the cards physical capacity is exceeded every writes go to /dev/null in reality.

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