I’m actually on a cycling holiday from tromso to bodo, so I’m writing this on my phone from a tent. So this article might be not so pretty as you are used to.
I have an answer to the the earlier quizzz, it’s the option of adding in a PCI h330-raid controller in the system and connecting the flexbay drives to it. This is coming from my tech guy at Dell, so thanks to you Cor for replying in the weekends and giving me much detail on the how and why! He told me the s2drn document has been updated and the pci-h330-raid is actually in the document itself;
A little further on it is being described;
I actually got in touch with a german collegue who had the same bsod problem and he got the same answer from Dell.de support and will get his PCI h330 raid controller soon so I’m hoping on reporting his results here. So thanks too to Andre from Nacura. I’m not sure how to get the controller when you are ordering a new system, I guess you have to contact Dell and request the pci h330 raidcontroller as a loose part and add it yourself (be sure to ask if the part will fit in your system based on the servicetag).
Some other details that might be interesting;
- The bsod is actually from where the s2d gets some “noise” from the raid controller on the sas bus and doesn’t know how to handle it and results in a bsod.
- the road go raid1 has been a long one, I have heard it is because MS didn’t see the need for it. I strongly disagree: think of the manpower needed to rebuilding a node (and the requirement that all driver versions need to be the same) or when a os disk fails or a 100tb resync that happens when a node fails, etc. Luckily Dell and customers disagree and MS listened to them.
- the 14G servers have a feature that will keep the noise from the sas bus, so raid1 in them should be less troublesome.
- The s2drn document is expected halfway august, so all this r730 stuff might be in the past.
- We are actually buikding a 2-node and another 4-node s2d cluster based on the r740xd so we’ll see!
- still no partnumbers in the s2drn document, i’ll ask my tech contact about that because it will life so much easier.
update 20170801: I got good news from Andre from Nacura. He has the onboard-h330-hba in his system and he has put in a pci-h330-raid card for the flexdrives and put it through a loadtest with random reboots without any bsod’s. He also heard from dell.de that this config is fully supported and the s130 will be supported through a fix (not public yet, but it can be requested through dell support). So we should be fine with the r730xd, lets hope it will go smoother with the r740xd..