DL360e G8 With TPM - No Drives on B320i show up during CentOS installation

[deufel]

Greetings,

I just purchased a used DL360e G8 for firmware testing before I inflict it on my customer's Gen8 and Gen9 DL360s and DL380s.. I put in three SATA drives and powered up the Dl360e. I booted the 2016.04 Firmware DVD. I ran the standard set of diags and when no errors were detected, I booted the server and got into the Storage Array Configuration utility in the BIOS. I configured two drives as a RAID1 entiity and a third drive as a JBOD. Eveerythig looked good so I booted the CentOS 7 installation DVD and was surprised to find that the installer could not see any of the arrays that the Array Utility clearly configured. I tried rebooting into the array utility and turned the RAID1 array into two JBODs. Booting the CentOS installer saw no available drives.

Opening up the DL360e, I found that it had a TPM module installed. SO, I have two questions:

1) Would the TPM keep the drives from being visible?

2) If the TPM is keeping the drives from being seen by the CentOS installed, can I safelt remove it and have the DL360 behave as if it didn't have a TPM installed or will removing the TPM brick the DL360? ( The server did not include the key to gain access to the TPM.)

I don't need, want, nor desire a TPM in this system. I only need to be able to do installations and checkout Firmware DVDs,.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Cheers...

[Jimmy Vance]

You need a special driver for RAID support on the "B" series controllers. As the 'hpvsa' driver is not open source it is not included on any Linux distribution media.

Start here, http://h20566.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/readIndex?sp4ts.oid=5293147&lang=en&cc=us Select your OS (for CentOS select Red Hat) , select Software - Driver update.  You want the "dd" image file and not the .rpm. Follow the information under Installation Instructions  For the B320i, you do not need to blacklist the ahci driver

[deufel]

Hi Jimmy,

Thanks for the info. I was afraid that this involved the TPM.

Next question... The installation instructions indicate that I should first login as root. This assumes that there is an OS on one of the disks in the server. Booting an OS from blank disks in order to apply the driver for the B320i seems to be Chicken .vs. Egg. 

How do I get from blank disks to a bootable config?

Thanks again...

Cheers...

Dan

[Jimmy Vance]

I think your are looking at the instructions fo the .rpm version of the driver, and not the driver update image file which is a 'dd' image file.

The .rpm version of the driver is to be applied to an already running system, the 'dd' image of the driver is an update image that is used during installation

on the download page instead of looking under 'Driver -Storage Controller', look under 'Software - Driver Update'