Tag: logical volume

Switching LSI SAS 2208 and similar chipsets to JBOD mode

~ effndc ~ 5 Comments

I have been doing testing various hyper converged storage platforms that can coexist with ESX, along with some bare metal software storage platforms.  In all cases I am using embedded RAID controllers in the servers, in some cases I using some add-on cards.  I have two cards in use currently, one is some Intel flashed LSI card and the other are SuperMicro LSI 2208 that is embedded in the FAT Twin.  While in all of these cases you can use single-disk RAID0 logical volumes, doing so adds a lot of extra steps and in many of my systems it offers no gain.

WARNING:  Proceed at your own risk, I recommend verifying that no data will be impacted by this task.  I also encourage you to confirm that the JBOD (aka pass-through mode) configuration is supported with your hardware and your storage platform.

It is possible that you can do some of these steps with getting into the boot BIOS, however in the case of the Intel flashed LSI cards the boot BIOS is really horrible.  I spent an hour trying to navigate the BIOS over remote console via the Intel Remote Management Module…but it was absolutely painful and the only thing that worked was using the wizard, which created undesirable configurations.  I ended up working around this by doing the following steps:

  1. Download a live boot CD Linux image
  2. Connect ISO to server through virtual media insertion of remote console
  3. Boot Linux image
  4. Configure networking on Linux
  5. Download MegaCLI to local workstation, then SCP it to the Linux machine
  6. Install MegaCLI
  7. Run MegaCLI commands

In more detail:

I downloaded MegaCLI and placed it on my Dropbox folder, this made it easy so I could just use wget on the Linux server after it booted.  Once Linux was booted I configured an IP address onto my appropriate network interface using ifconfig statement, added DNS to resolve.conf, and a default gateway.  I then could SSH in where I had copy and paste to just run the same commands quickly across my dozen hosts.  In my case I selected the CentOS 6.5 LiveCD from a close by mirror, but you should be able to use any Linux bootable CD that is of a more recent build.

I will warn that doing these steps with any data in place will absolutely lead to data destruction.  I am not liable for how quickly the -CfgLdDel command obliterates any existing logical volume configuration, proceed at your own risk.

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