P816i-a Smart Array logical drives not presented to OS

[Dan Crossman]

Hi -  We have a  DL380 Gen10 with a P816i-a Smary Array card running Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS.   Physical drives not configured in any Logical drive are visibile to the OS.   Logical drives created with greater than level 1  RAID (mirror) are not visible to the OS.   I believe this is because of default mixed mode of the controller (both HBA and RAID supported simultaneously).  Is there a way to set RAID mode only? 

(My guess is that the E208i and P408i controllers behave the same way. )

Also ssacli reports: "Smart Array (Error: This controller has an incompatible driver. Please resolve the conflict between the aacraid and smartpqi drivers. Refer to controller documentation for more information.)"  

Hopefully a new version of ssacli is available soon that supports the array  and/or drivers are made available for generic linux  ie not just redhat/suse.

Thanks, -dan

[Dan Crossman]

The answer was to move to Ubuntu 18 (bionic).  The smartpqi driver is loaded by default, and no aacraid driver.  The RAID6 volume is now visible to the OS. 

ssacli  is still broken:

Error: No controllers detected. Possible causes:
- The driver for the installed controller(s) is not loaded.
- On LINUX, the scsi_generic (sg) driver module is not loaded.
See the README file for more details.

I'll try loading the sg driver next.

[esantora]

I just found that installing the HWE kernel for  16.04 was sufficient to get the OS to recognize the full size of a RAID6 logical drive. Definitely saved me the time of upgrading or re-installing.

Just `sudo apt-get install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-16.04` and reboot