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Re: ProLiant ML10 v2 PCIe SSD boot disk?

 
Evan__1
New Member

ProLiant ML10 v2 PCIe SSD boot disk?

Can the HP ProLiant ML10 v2 Tower be configured to use a PCIe SSD drive for the boot disk?

According to one of the answers on this question, the server apparently uses the first SATA port it can find a drive in.

https://community.hpe.com/t5/ProLiant-Servers-ML-DL-SL/HP-ML10-v2-set-the-correct-boot-order-for-HDD/td-p/6838815

I don't know if that's true or not, but in either case:

Is it possible to use a PCIe SSD drive as the boot disk with the OS installed, while using the remaining SATA and SAS ports for storage drives?

7 REPLIES 7
MarcinWeg
HPE Pro

Re: ProLiant ML10 v2 PCIe SSD boot disk?

Hello

According to Quick Specs for ML10v2 it is not supported to equip ML10v2 server with SSD drives;

http://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/redirect.aspx?/products/quickspecs/15220_div/15220_div.PDF

 

Regards

Marcin Weglarski

HPE Employee

Accept or Kudo

Sjoerd69
Occasional Advisor

Re: ProLiant ML10 v2 PCIe SSD boot disk?

### it is not supported to equip ML10v2 server with SSD drives

Well that is simply not true... of course it will support SSD drives, it can even boot from SSD drives. The hardware does not make a distinction between mechanical or ssd drives. SATA is SATA...

There are two ways to accomplish this. Either you configure the SATA ports to be in RAID mode and connect an SSD to SATA port 5 or 6 and use the SSA tools to configure the drive as a logical boot device, which is cumbersome and sometimes it loses the configuration!? Easier is it to set the drives in AHCI mode and reroute the cables, and connect cable one of the drive bay to your boot SSD. I actually got two SSDs of the first two SATA ports, and use SATA ports 3,4,5,6 for the 4 drive bay and use mdadm for a RAID5 over 4 drives.

bernie051
Occasional Visitor

Re: ProLiant ML10 v2 PCIe SSD boot disk?

Hi @Sjoerd69 ,

How do I go about doing that? In the HP SSA, it says there are no controllers detected when I try and configure the RAID. Is there a driver I am missing? I am pretty sure I have the most recent firmware. I am trying to get to boot via SSD but when I choose it as the first device, it just goes to the second option. 

Thanks.

Sjoerd69
Occasional Advisor

Re: ProLiant ML10 v2 PCIe SSD boot disk?

Hi Bernie, it's been a while I used this, but indeed within HP SSA you should be able to see all physical SATA devices connected. If I remember correctly you can then create a logical device with the SSD, which you assign as the boot volume. And then on reboot the SSD logical device should be visible to your USB OS installation.

What I did notice however that on occasions, maybe once or twice a year, for some unexplained reason the logical volume would disappear and you can no longer boot. You can then reactive the volume using SSA without the need to reinstall the whole thing.

To prevent all these problems, and even I had many issue booting into SSA with particular releases (I think I had to use some other versions), I decided to go a different route. I got myself a pair of SATA extension cables and rerouted the internal cables. So I now have the SSD connected to the spider cable that was connected to the first drive in the bay, and have shifted all the cables up. So the 4 HDD in the bay are now connected to two of the SATA spider cables, and two of them to the separate SATA 5+6 ports.

With the config set to AHCI mode, the drives show up in the right order with the SSD connected to SATA port 1 and it will always try to boot from there. No more hassle with SSA, etc. I think long term this is a better option than going the logical volume config route with SSA.

Good luck,

Niels

Sjoerd69
Occasional Advisor

Re: ProLiant ML10 v2 PCIe SSD boot disk?

P.-S.: After reading your question more thoroughly you are not seeing the controller. I'm not sure but you may have to use one of the HP SSA versions... I noticed that with the newer versions I couldn't get it to work either, or some of them even didn't boot. The last version I kept was ssaoffline-3.25-4.0.iso, so maybe you can try to see if that solves something. It is likely that in the BIOS you need to set the controller to the right mode as well, so play with those settings a bit. Please do all this before installing a server, because some of these settings may screw up your OS install, or worse, your data drives.

bernie051
Occasional Visitor

Re: ProLiant ML10 v2 PCIe SSD boot disk?

Thank you SO much for a response Niels. I have been using the offline SPP 2018110. That could be a reason why I do not see it. Though, a real older version didn't see it either. I will try another one. It has been really frustrating. I've tried each of the RAID bios configurations and still nothing. Hopefully the image you named will work.

Sjoerd69
Occasional Advisor

Re: ProLiant ML10 v2 PCIe SSD boot disk?

no worries and good luck. you should be able to get to boot from an SSD drive on SATA port 5 or 6 using the logical volume config in HP SSA. however if you still struggle, a better long term solution is probably rewiring the internal cables with some SATA extension cables (they're cheap on eBay and come in the single connector with power and SATA). you'll need two of those and some regular power and SATA cables, and then shift all the internal SATA spider cable up by two ports, leaving space for your SSD (or two) on port 1 + 2... set storage mode to AHCI and you'll easily boot of SATA drive 1. no more hassle with the internal SATA controller, etc. i use CentOS mdadm software raid on my data drives. if you're not using CentOS but some other, you may get a kernel as well that allows you to configure for instance a 2nd SSD as a "bcache" drive, which will allow you to speed up network writes to your mechanical raid... endless possibility to tinker with this machine. I've got netatalk installed so it is an Apple Timemachine backup device, I've got KVM VMs running, I've got Plex as a media server, etc.