{"id":64,"date":"2021-09-20T02:04:23","date_gmt":"2021-09-20T02:04:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/?p=64"},"modified":"2022-04-19T07:44:08","modified_gmt":"2022-04-19T07:44:08","slug":"hlb-part-2-hbas-and-prep-for-external-storage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/?p=64","title":{"rendered":"HLB part 2: HBAs and prep for external storage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In part 1 of my homelab build series, I looked at the storage requirements for my homelab build project and began narrowing down possible choices for each type of storage device required in a vSAN cluster host.<\/p>\n<p>Up to this point I&#8217;d made a decision for two of the three devices I needed for each host in the cluster:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><del>Storage for the hypervisor OS (ESXi)<\/del><\/li>\n<li><del>Storage for the VSAN caching tier<\/del><\/li>\n<li>Storage for the VSAN capacity tier<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>William Lam&#8217;s approach to this problem, as detailed in his <a href=\"https:\/\/williamlam.com\/2018\/11\/supermicro-e300-9d-sys-e300-9d-8cn8tp-is-a-nice-esxi-vsan-kit.html\">blog post<\/a>, was to take advantage of the server&#8217;s PCIe 3.0 x16 slot to add another M.2 storage device and satisfy the requirements for both devices that way. For a lean &#8220;proof of concept&#8221; vSAN cluster, building each host with a single cache device and a single capacity device is going to be optimal\u2014vSAN capacity disk groups can be configured with a minimum of one and a maximum of seven storage devices.<\/p>\n<p>Adding more than one capacity device to my hosts will make my lab take up more physical space and will increase power consumption, though it will eliminate a single storage device as a single point of failure and will enable each host&#8217;s capacity disk group to be made up of several less expensive, lower-capacity SSDs that still have power loss protection (PLP) capability. To me, this tradeoff seemed to better suit my requirements.<\/p>\n<p>Though in order to enable my lab servers to connect to external storage, I&#8217;d first need to to install a host bus adapter (HBA) card in each one. I looked through VMware&#8217;s hardware compatibility guide first so that I could narrow down potential candidates for HBAs. While I was comparing and researching the handful of supported HBA devices, it looked like I could achieve an enormous cost savings for several components of my build if I was willing to commit to slower 6Gb\/s SAS-2 storage devices vs. devices made to be compatible with the newer, faster 12Gb\/s SAS-3 interface specification. I didn&#8217;t have much trouble making the choice to stick with SAS-2 devices (see requirement number two in my HLB Part 1 post!).<\/p>\n<p>Once I&#8217;d made the decision to stick with SAS-2 devices, it looked like the right HBA for this application would be the LSI 9207-8e\u2014and I was glad to see there&#8217;s no short supply of these on eBay.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-53\" src=\"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20200928_211222_NR.resized-rotated-e1631485402407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"488\" srcset=\"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20200928_211222_NR.resized-rotated-e1631485402407.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20200928_211222_NR.resized-rotated-e1631485402407-300x143.jpg 300w, https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20200928_211222_NR.resized-rotated-e1631485402407-768x366.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Once my HBA cards had arrived, I needed to install them into 90 degree angle brackets that would allow them to fit inside of the E300-9D-4CN8TP chassis.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-47\" src=\"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20200325_181350.resized.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"842\" height=\"656\" srcset=\"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20200325_181350.resized.jpg 842w, https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20200325_181350.resized-300x234.jpg 300w, https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20200325_181350.resized-768x598.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 842px) 100vw, 842px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-28\" src=\"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_0010.resized.resized.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"843\" height=\"632\" srcset=\"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_0010.resized.resized.jpg 1008w, https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_0010.resized.resized-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_0010.resized.resized-768x576.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 843px) 100vw, 843px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-50\" src=\"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20200325_181808.resized.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"844\" height=\"646\" srcset=\"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20200325_181808.resized.jpg 922w, https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20200325_181808.resized-300x230.jpg 300w, https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20200325_181808.resized-768x588.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 844px) 100vw, 844px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>While researching HBAs, I noticed that some folks had experienced issues in getting their LSI2308-based devices (including the LSI 9207-8e) to play nice with ESXi and vSAN. I needed to make sure the firmware on my HBAs matched the LSI driver included in ESXi 6.x. I found <a href=\"https:\/\/forums.serverbuilds.net\/t\/guide-updating-your-lsi-sas-controller-with-a-uefi-motherboard\/131\">this guide<\/a> very helpful as I worked through the process of flashing the correct firmware to each card. I also went ahead and erased the BIOS from each HBA since I wouldn&#8217;t be booting from externally-connected storage devices\u2014doing this shaves a couple minutes off of the server startup time.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-83\" src=\"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20210426_175950_HDR.resized-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"LSI firmware flash utility\" width=\"690\" height=\"518\" srcset=\"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20210426_175950_HDR.resized-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20210426_175950_HDR.resized-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20210426_175950_HDR.resized-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20210426_175950_HDR.resized-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/IMG_20210426_175950_HDR.resized.jpg 1632w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 690px) 100vw, 690px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Once the new HBAs were installed and flashed with the correct firmware, I was ready to move on to selecting and connecting external storage to my servers. More details on that stage of the lab build will appear in Part 3 of the series! Thanks for reading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In part 1 of my homelab build series, I looked at the storage requirements for my homelab build project and began narrowing down possible choices for each type of storage device required in a vSAN cluster host. Up to this point I&#8217;d made a decision for two of the three devices I needed for each host in the cluster: Storage for the hypervisor OS (ESXi) Storage for the VSAN caching &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178,"href":"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigdata.lol\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}