Query: Possible to choose the physical bay in DL 380 to boot from? - Prolaint server - DL380

[MrBean1962]

Hi,

I am new here, I hope I do everything according to the rules. If not, let me know, admins. 

I bought a DL380 server with 15 3'5 bays two weeks ago. The server is equipped with an HP smart array P840 raid controller (set to use HBA mode). I started using two physical discs in bays 1 and 2 of unit 1. Installed Proxmox on the drive in bay1 and the second disc as additional storage, available in Proxmox. 

Later I added 8 x 8TB drives in the next bays and installed TrueNas Scale on Proxmox, and passed on these drives to TrueNas Scale in Proxmox to allow TrueNas to have full control over these drives. In the virtualized TrueNas Scale I created an array of these drives with 1 drive tolerance (zraid1). 

It all worked perfectly until I rebooted the server. I couldn't find a valid boot drive. It looks like the DL380 wanted to boot from the drive in bay5 which is one of the passed-on drives to TrueNas. I am clueless as to why this happens. I needed to remove the 8 drives first before the Proliant started booting from bay1 again. After it had booted, I could reinsert the drives again and then all was working fine again. 

Now, I don't like to execute this workaround every time I would want (or need) to reboot the server. 

Is there a way to configure the DL380 to always boot from bay1, unit 1 (or any other bay one should want to use)?

To already answer the question that could pop up: I prefer truenas to create an array for me and control the array rather than me creating an array by the p840 raid-controller (if you think I had better have the P840 raid controller be in control of the disks arrays, please let me know). 

Thanks in advance!

[support_s · Accepted solution]

System recommended content:

1. HPE SimpliVity DL380 Gen10 Servers - Recommended BIOS settings

2. HPE ProLiant DL380 G5 Storage Server - System Recovery

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[MrBean1962]

Hi all,

Going over the BIOS settings as recommended by HPE, I found my system was using LEGACY BIOS Boot. To be able to select either the image or the physical bay you'd like to boot from, you require UEFI BIOS. 

After I had switched to UEFI BIOS more advanced options became available. I could choose to boot from ProxMox application (which is installed on the drive in bay1, unit 1 in my example), from USB, etc., etc., but I could also select to boot from any of the front bays (12 LFF) and I can even choose to boot from the PCI-E NVME M2 drive (this is certainly something I'd like to try!). 

[BPSingh]

Greetings!

Are you able to boot the server from the desired OS after selecting UEFI boot mode?