Upgrading rack server to CentOS 7

[Mythobeast]

I'm attempting to install CentOS 7 on our C240's, and I'm stymied at the point where I use dd to install drivers. The instructions say to download the driver package and install dd-snic-..., but that doesn't exist in the driver package. I tried a few others, but none of them allows the install package to access the combined raid.

Does anyone know which specific drivers I should be installing for CentOS 7.4, so that the installer can access the primary drive raid?

[Kirk J]

Greetings.

The megaraid_sas module for the LSI 12Gb raid controller as well as the 9xxx controllers listed inbox for 7.3, and would expect that as well with 7.4.

If you ignore/skip the manual driver load, does the storage scan not see the Virtual drive you have created?

 If your VD is greater than 2 TB, make sure you are booting the centos virtual DVD/iso in UEFI mode as that will be needed to work with GPT boot vol and UEFI boot partition.

Thanks,

Kirk...

[Mythobeast]

If you ignore/skip the manual driver load, does the storage scan not see the Virtual drive you have created?

Perhaps this is my disconnect. The machine has two real drives which should be raid0'd into a single drive with two partitions. The boot menu sees things that way, but the OS boot sees four independent partitions. I'm not trying to create a virtual machine, I'm attempting to reprovision the base operating system.

[Kirk J]

In Raid-speak, a virtual drive is a raid volume, VD, etc

Can you confirm if your drives are connected to the 12Gb raid controller, or the onboard PCH controller?

During post, the option rom for the 12Gb MRaid card should list a summary of the attached drives and any virtual raid volumes/VDs that have been created.

If the drives are connected to a 12Gb raid controller, but you have them in jbod mode, then you might be seeing the individual drives.

Can you post a screen capture post when the raid controller/drive info is displayed?

Thanks,

Kirk...

[Mythobeast]

I haven't put my hands on the box, but I'm pretty sure they're connected to the PCH. Hopefully these images will tell the story...

The pile of disks listed by the RAID controller are all storage devices, and the PCH SATA devices listed on the boot menu are the ones it's supposed to be using for the OS.

[Kirk J · Accepted solution]

Is this a c240 m3 or M4?

If so, sounds like the PCH controller is still in sata/ahci mode still.

See https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/hw/C240M4/install/C240M4/raid.html#80418 on changing the PCH controller to LSI software raid mode.

Once that is done, you will get a 2nd option rom at post, for the Megaraid SR, that should present you with the option to hit Cntrl+M, and should be able to configure a raid 0 or raid 1 for the SSDs on the riser.

Once you get the virtual drive/raid vol defined here, you may need to go pull the Megaraid SR driver from the drivers iso.  This will be in the /<OS>/Storage/Intel/C600/ structure.

I would disable any unneeded option roms (i.e. the LOM ports, add-in nics).

Thanks,

Kirk...

[Mythobeast]

Thanks, Kirk.
The driver issue was solved by using the CentOS7-Everything iso instead of the standard one. After that was settled, I still had to enable the SATA raid in BIOS. I believe that we still need the Megaraid SR driver because, in addition to the two SD's, we also have some 24 storage drives installed.

Thanks again, this got me past a roadblock.