How to install ZFS on Dell Poweredge server and Dell disk array without using the RAID controller

Question

How to set up ZFS using a Dell Poweredge and disk arrays (DAS).

I am completely new to this and have the following questions:

Does the RAID card need to be configured? (e.g. virtual device)
Do I need to turn the RAID card off in BIOS?
How does the array appear in linux? Is it listed under /dev or do other packages need to be installed before it can be seen?

shodanshok · Accepted Answer · 2017-01-14 10:46:18Z

It depends:

H200/300 and PERC9 (ie: 330, 730, 830) cards have the capability to work in pass-through mode, meaning that the disks can be directly presented to the operating system. To do that, you simply need to use unconfigured disks (ie: with no RAID metadata) and to avoid configuring any RAID array (VDISK in DELL terminology)
H700/710 cards does not have pass-through capability. As a workaround, you can configure each disk as an independent RAID0 array and build your ZFS pool from these "fake", single-disk arrays. This is not recommended, though, as ZFS really expect to have low-level access to your disks. You should be better off using a classical RAID5/10 array and formatting is with ZFS.
as DELL PERC cards really are rebranded LSI gear, it is sometime possible to reflash them with LSI firmware, which may enable passthrough. This is card/firmware dependant, though.

Finally, as the backplane is connected to the RAID card, turning it off will make the disks inaccessible.

H730 do have a pass-through capability as well as a non-raid capability (per device). — sfk
– sfk, Commented Jan 14, 2017 at 9:21
I've just checked the PERC9 (330/730/830) docs and yes, you are right. Than you for pointing that out. — shodanshok
– shodanshok, Commented Jan 14, 2017 at 10:45
The Dell 12Gbps SAS HBA or LSI-9207-8e would typically be used for JBODs for ZFS. Internal drives could either use the HBA330 or an LSI 9207-8i (or a Dell Hxxx card that supports pass-through mode). — JimNim
– JimNim, Commented Jan 16, 2017 at 17:14
Is SMART data passed through to the OS when using the H730 in HBA mode on an R730? — TJ Zimmerman
– TJ Zimmerman, Commented Apr 19, 2020 at 7:47
@TJZimmerman the passing of SMART data is controller and firmware dependent. If you can't see them, you can try quering via the megaraid driver - ie something similar to smartctl -a -d megaraid,0 /dev/sda, where "0" is the disk id of the sda array. If using passthrough disks, you can try using 0 as disk id and sda, sdb, sdc ... as disk array. — shodanshok
– shodanshok, Commented Apr 19, 2020 at 11:22

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