Help with new Dell t320 (set up for homelab use)

Hardware
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Hello all, need some help again.

So I finally got my Dell Poweredge t320. So first thing I needed to do because I was sure I wanted to use ZFS with either TrueNAS or possibly proxmox, was flash my Dell h310 over to IT mode.
This went fine and completed successfully like with my previous lsi card I had in my other machine.
The problem I am running into now is that none of the drives are recognized by Dell IPMI or the software for it. They are there and recognized if I try to install windows no problem after I “Activate” a drive to install to.
I have one more thing to try…taping up two contacts on the card is supposed to fix this… haven’t gone that way yet.
The other thing that it may be is that I’m using a hot plug backplane that came with the server instead of breakout cables?..
That or I’m missing something. Anyone else have experience with this? I never put the bios back on the card for uefi boot because it’s supposed to work without them…should I install those.
Any help is appreciated.
Like I said only windows is recognizing the drives…esxi is not during install.

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You may need to tell the bios that this is a non-windows OS.
Check device support for proxmox.
On this there is a setting for the interface for storage that needs setting for non- windows

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Thanks I’ll try that when I try proxmox.

Right now I can’t get the dell software to register the h310 as a device and then have it see the drives to boot from.
If I do a direct connect from mobo to a drive it will install to that disk, and then the os will recognize the drives… so why can’t dell idrac?
Thought having this gear would help…little frustrated.

Tape wasn’t any use. The pcie card isn’t recognized by dell system. I found another guide I used before that involves using a Linux boot tool. But I couldn’t install that because my root was disabled…I’m giving up for the night… I’m about to set fire to it all… I think I need to install the uefi drivers because that’s how I’m booting the system… I’m at a loss…

I have gotten into the bios menu for the h310 that is in IT mode, all is well here and all drives are showing up properly as well as identification lights working.

I had attempted a cool down and cold start with electrical connections removed from the psu’s. This didn’t resolve the issue of idrac and dell software recognizing the drives, or the controller.

I may just have to add in a ssd for testing using the sata interface for the 5.25 drives to install a OS and see what happens. I did this previously with windows server and it worked… I guess I will have to rely on the hypervisor and hope it can monitor drive health.

Fan speed maxing out because of miss interpreted disk Temps hasent been a issue like I have seen some people have.

I may try windows to see if idrac has a driver for the lsi sas controller the h310 controller is flashed to.
Thats it so far.

It appears the dell life cycle controller can’t see the drives so I’m am looking into fixes so I can boot from one of the drives attached to sas backplane. If I can’t I may just opt for having to run a drive via sata to
motherboard, or when my sd adapter arrives go that route for OS install.

I installed ESXi on a usb… still no access to drives connected to the H310 SAS card that is flashed to LSI IT mode.

I must be missing something to get this to work. I may give up and have to rely on a hardware RAID to get any futher installing VM’s or setting up services.’

Kind of a big disappointment… I had high hopes for this gear. Maybe I should DISABLE the Dell Life Cycle Controller. Has anyone working with Dell servers from the 12th Generation setting them up for home use?

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Not an expert but have used raid controllers, prefer software raid in small setups.
H310 needs steps followed like Disk initialisation and syncing before it present a device for use. can’t remeber but it takes some time deending how you setup the drives for raid.
Boot UEFI only if you just want a windows server, use other/legacy for anything else.
BIOS set USB/CD first boot then once install of os, make sure its the raid container being booted to.
Haven’t had to configure raid cars in a while might have missed something

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Yeah, that’s the problem… Dells Life cycle controller doesn’t recognize drives attached to the raid controller as bootable. Which is weird because it does show in the bios boot screen and populates all the drives. It for some reason doesn’t translate to the dell software. Once I boot windows server, proxmox or citrix all the drives are avaliable.
I’m ok with it for now. I’ll just have to reconfigure if I want to try vmware. I’m having to use a separate boot drive. It works best it can for now. I’m not sure even reflashing the h310 will work with vmware or Dell. I may see if I can get a diffrent faster adapter that does 12gbs sas drives for giggles in the future… or an external sas cabinet. Wish I could get my hands on one reasonably to have a central data store to run my machines off of using scsi targets maybe. Eh, now I’m dreaming again lol.

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I have the t610 which is the dual CPU version of the t310 which is the previous gen of your machine, you should have general purpose sata ports, I used mine for the freenas drive which is in the 5.25 bay

You can find some really interesting adapters to 3D print for dual 5.25 to 3.5 bay adapters

I use that with a fan front cover

I’ll link some next time I got to town for fast internet

I did have trouble installing freenas, but I just moved my old existing freeNas drive and it booted right up, just had to changed the default nic

IMG_20210413_210119
IMG_20210413_2101192610Ă—3683 426 KB

Your board layout will probably be different since it’s newer

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I actually added a pcie slot card with one pcie m.2 I can’t boot from (using it for optane) and a sata m.2 with a cable to the motherboard. I have it set up to dual boot to either windows server 2019 gen2 or proxmox at the moment because A) I’m comfortable with its format and B) it’s linux based so I can learn. Windows because with new GeForce pass-through changes could be fun to play with and I have a GRID k2 collecting dust I bought before I knew the woes of consumer gpu virtualization.

I have the dual SD card slot but haven’t gotten that to pan out yet. Supposed to be a good option for esxi because it loads into ram and there aren’t many writes. Supposedly.

Hope to learn to use rsync for my main server and start to toy with 10gb network at home. Still have the new Cisco managed switch I need to check out.

If I need more horse power I may try to get a t420 dual cpu motherboard… they seem really close to possibly being interchangeable…

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You have to pay a subscription for virtualization driver and nvidia has stopped subscription support for the older cards because milking you for a card you own isn’t enough, they want you to buy new cards too

NVME wasn’t supported until I think haswell, so you won’t be able to boot off it even with a adapter

Idk what’s going on with the sata M.2 adapter, are you having the adapter plugged into the boards sata port?

As far as your boot medium, everyone always say
“Just boot off a sd card or flash drive”

The reality is flash drives and sd cards are some of the most unreliable and cheaply made storage mediums that will die suddenly without even doing anything to them

Run that baby off spinning rust or SSD

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Roger, I am. The dual card m.2 card uses pcie lanes for the nvme drive, then a sata cable to the main board for a sata m.2 drive I boot off of. I’m getting it going. Just a learning curve from consumer hardware and software. Once I figured out they had upgrade packages for all the devices in one iso, updating was much easier.

I will have to look into a error code I’m getting proxmox about side channel vulnerability. It was supposed to be fixed with the nonfree repositories, but it came back after a reboot.

I also may disable the dell life cycle controller while I’m setting things up to cut out 5 minutes added to each boot for it to take inventory every boot lol. Should have done that sooner would have gotten a lot more don’t today with the server lol.

Annnnnnd sucks to hear about the k2… really thought I had a shot to accelerate graphics on a few vms just because. Guess I’ll try to dump it asap…

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