Daniel Jitnah <djitnah@greenwareit.com.au> writes:
Hi all,
I have a system running on a Linux *software raid* 10 setup on Ubuntu 14.04. This system is running very well.
However for some reasons this system needs to be moved from one (hardware) host to another host (a HP ML110 G7 Proliant Server). I had in mind to just take the drives from one machine to another. (The actual workload is in a VM hosted on a very basic KVM installation. so as long as I get a base host running, I am happy!)
The HP Proliant though has hardware raid, (and I don't think I can disable it. The original host does not have raid.)
[I don't remember if "Proliant" is rackmount. If not, this anecdote is probably useless...] IIRC I had a HP G8 server, and I bought a "passthrough" HBA for it. That let the OS see the raw drives, so Debian could do both SMART monitoring and RAID. (i.e. no HW raid at all.) I ran into two problems: 1. about half the back panel was part of the default RAID HBA, which the passthrough HBA didn't replace. Yay, broken airflow. 2. there were two 4xSATA cables between the hotswap bays at the front, and the HBA at the back. Because the passthrough HBA was smaller, neither cable reached. I "fixed" that by swapping the cables over (so ONE reached), and saying "this is now a 4-disk server". Since the passthrough HBA was (IIRC) a first-party HP part, I was *not* impressed. PS: I think we still used HP-branded drives, so I dunno if the passthrough HBA avoided that "feed me HP drives or else" thing.