Proliant ML310e Gen 8 v2 - Booting off SSD

[TheDeedster]

I bought a used HP Prolaint ML310e Gen 8 v2 tower server with a 4-bay LFF hot-swap drive bay installed.

My intended purpose is to host an Ubuntu 22.04 Server on the machine and use 4 x 4 TB hard drives in the LFF drive bay as a RAID 5 array for storing surveillance footage and a private cloud.

I am pretty new to Ubuntu Server and servers in general, this setup is intended to help me learn, and I have had some issues getting it setup the way I want.

Basically, I installed a 240GB SATA SSD into SATA port 6 on the motherboard to use as a boot drive for linux. With all 4 hard drives installed, no matter what SATA controller I choose, (b120i or the intel AHCI controller) I cannot boot Ubuntu server from the SSD. When I go to reboot, it tries to boot from HDD and fails, then it tries to boot from CDROM and reboots in a loop. 

I am able to use a bootable flash drive to install Ubuntu Server 22.04, and the installer is able to successfully install the the OS on the SSD, and it can set up the software RAID 5 using the ubuntu installer without issue, but when it comes time to reboot, it wont boot to ubuntu.

However, when I take out the 4 x 4TB hard drives from the LFF bay, and just leave the 240GB SSD installed in SATA port 6, I am able to install Ubuntu Server 22.04 on the SSD, AND I am able to reboot without any issues at all. Only when I plug in the 4 drives into the LFF bay am I unable to have the server boot into the SSD.

I have scoured all the information online including on this forum related to my issue, and I cant narrow down the issue to any one particular thing. Can I get some help with this? I could use some clarification on the following:

1: The documentation for this server states that the Maximum Internal Storage for a ML310e Gen 8 V2, with the hot-swap LFF 4-drive bay, is limited to 4 x 4 TB (total 16 TB), which is exactly what I am using in the 4-bay LFF. Is this the maximum internal storage TOTAL for the entire server? In other words, does plugging in my 240 GB SATA SSD into SATA port 6 on the motherboard exceed the supported "maximum internal storage" limit for the entire server, because I already have 16 TB installed via the 4 x 4 TB LFF drives?

2: I have been thinking of whether it would be worth installing the SSD into a USB3.0 enclosure and booting from it that way, since USB boot seems to work fine. However I am unaware of what potential problems or consequences that can arise from running a server OS off of a USB SSD, vs using the SATA port, other than some reduced performance by using USB. Would this be a bad idea if my first question is true and I cannot support the additional SSD via SATA?

3: I have also heard about a USB boot drive to run something called GRUB, and then having that point to the SSD as the boot drive. Not sure if this would be an option, or whether the 16 TB limit would prevent this.

4: I am wondering how to install the most recent service pack for this server but im having trouble finding the download and install documentation  for it, and was wondering what the recommended install method would be?

Thank you in advance!

[support_s]

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1. Notice: HP ProLiant Servers - HP Smart Array Controllers and HP Dynamic Smart Array Controllers Configured for Zero Memory RAID (ZMR) Are Limited to Using RAID 0, RAID 1, or RAID 10

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[TVVJ]

Hello,

You download the latest iteration of SPP for Gen8 server from the Gen8 Service Pack for ProLiant page.

Regards,

[TheDeedster]

It turns out that one of my hypothesis was correct.

The HP Proliant ML310e Gen 8 v2 will only try to boot from the FIRST hard drive it detects, before automatically trying other boot options such as CDROM.

Because my SSD was plugged into SATA 6 on the motherboard directly, it was the 6th SATA device in the boot order and thus the server would never even check if there was a bootloader on it. It was only checking the first hard drive in the LFF Bay. So nothing was working to get it to boot to linux.

I tried every possible combination of SATA controllers and installing the GRUB loader on various combinations of disks, and the only thing that worked was:

1: I set the SATA Controller to the Intel AHCI sata controller.
2: I took out the hard drive from LFF drive bay 1 and stuck the SSD into LFF drive bay 1.
3: I mounted the HDD that was in drive bay 1 , using a 5.25" to 3.5" bay adapter to install the hard drive in the second 5.25" bay, and Iconnected it to SATA 6.

As soon as I did that, it booted straight to Linux. This confirms that the server will not check past HDD1 for a bootloader, which is extremely inconvenient because I had to use a hot swap LFF bay for the boot SSD.

Now though, everything seems to be working. The previous answer about HP controllers not supporting RAID 5 is irrelevant since I am running purely software RAID 5 via Linux mdadm.

I appreciate the link for the service pack! I hope this advice can help someone else from the frustration I went through haha.

[BPSingh]

Greetings!

Please confirm if you had checked the boot order in BIOS. 

Also check the status after disabling the boot logical volume on the Smart Array. 

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docLocale=en_US&docId=kc0106285en_us

Ensure the firmware level on the server is running on latest revision.