Running out of things to die - TrueNAS Motherboard Replacement

from surly brewing company it is the dumpster fire 2020. i sure hope this doesn't end up being an annual release [Music] if you've ever thought about running your own servers for home or business use but don't want to deal with the headaches of maintaining hardware why not let lenode host your services for you they make it simple to deploy and manage your own cloud infrastructure with solutions ranging from a single shared cpu to massive multi-core virtual machines you can even add in dedicated enterprise gpus for machine learning with shared cpu plans starting at as little as five dollars per month and scaling up to as high as you need to go you'll be able to find a hosting plan that fits your needs they also have 24 7 365 support available regardless of your plan size that's a better support plan than i have on my personal server rack i can tell you that much visit lynnode.com craft computing and get a 100 60-day credit just for signing up for a new account that's lenode.com craft computing and thanks to lenode for sponsoring today's video welcome back to craft computing everyone as always i'm jeff so i mentioned in the last video that i usually have really good luck when it comes to hardware reliability however it seems i'm paying all of my dues at once starting last week with the realization i needed to replace all of my seagate constellation es2 enterprise hard drives out of my free nas box and moving on to today where this is the motherboard out of my truenow server and you'll notice it's not in my truenow server so this motherboard right here the gigabyte pa7pesh2 has been a staple of my home lab for the last two and a half years i first bought it to be my only virtualization server and then when i finally started upgrading to some better and better hardware for that i moved this over into my true nas box now a dual socket xeon motherboard with five pci express expansion slots is probably overkill for most home nas servers however in my case i do use this nas primarily to edit the videos that you all like watching and so i actually do take advantage of every single aspect of this board sure the cpus are definitely overpowered with 12 cores and 24 threads in total at 3.3 gigahertz it is nice to have that single threaded performance when i'm trying to upload and even pull data off to do my editing the board has three built-in mini sas connection ports meaning it can control up to 12 hard drives without the use for a bay expander with 16 dimm slots on board getting 128 gigabytes of ram on here was pretty trivial and inexpensive given the low price of eight gigabyte ddr3 dimms and while most people don't fill up all of their pci express slots i actually managed to populate every single one of these especially after i started adding cash cards to my nas array so why is this motherboard on the table well unfortunately it's not because i'm upgrading it's because the board just flat out died and it died very very slowly uh for about the last three months or so i was having issues with the server just randomly locking up in the middle of the night nothing was being accessed the server certainly wasn't working all that hard but i would wake up to a failed backup notification i'd go to check the server and the file server was just offline it's powered on but offline a quick reboot and everything would come right back up as usual with no lingering issues and so i just chalked it up to random happenstance however when it randomly happens like 10 times in a week it's time to start investigating i started going through component by component on the system trying to figure out where the issue was coming from checked the memory all of the add-in cards even swapped out cpus a couple of times and the server itself has been in and out of my rack probably at least a dozen times over the last couple of months in the end it wound up being the motherboard in fact today i can't even turn the system on when i press the power button i'll get a small relay click and then the system will immediately turn itself back off so we have a brand new motherboard to swap in but i figured if i have to take the whole system apart anyway i'd might as well do a couple of upgrades while i'm in there now we will be sticking with the 2011 cpu platform but i will be upgrading the chips themselves from the e5 2643 cpus up to the e5 4627 v2 cpus so going from sandy bridge to ivy bridge and 4 cores to 8 cores memory will be sticking with the same capacity of 128 gigabytes in total but i am swapping out the 8 gigabyte dimms for 16 gigabyte dimms still at 1866 and ecc registered this gives me some expansion potential in the future if i feel i need to upgrade to 256 gigabytes i'm also going to be adding in a new host bus adapter which should be pretty obvious since the gigabyte motherboard has a built-in sas controller i picked up this unit which is a dell hba330 which i believe is based on the lsi 9300 sas controller the main difference is the old sas controller uses a six gigabit mini sas connection this one actually uses a 12 gigabit now the back plate in my super micro 846 is still a six gigabit connection but if i ever wanted to swap that out for something else this will give me the option to get some more speed out of my hard drive arrays of course doing that upgrade might necessitate a new chassis so we'll see if that need ever arises the other major change is i'm going to be virtualizing my true nas install using proxmox this gives a couple of advantages number one if i wanted to back up my truenow server and then just slap it onto another proxmox server all i need to do is transfer the hba into a new server and i can fire up my existing trunas configuration versus right now i'm going to have to back up the configuration install trueness fresh and refresh the configuration which works but i'd rather have the versatility of having all of my systems inside of a vm so now that you know all the problems that i'm trying to solve why don't we say how we're going to solve them first off i'm moving to the super micro x9dai which is again still a dual 2011 motherboard but has a full six pci express expansion slots all of them being x8 or higher now a couple notes here and that's that the x9dai is actually a workstation board and not a server board so i am giving up a couple features with that for one i don't have ipmi on this motherboard and number two there's no video output on here meaning if i want video output out of the server i'm gonna have to plug in a video card however i am currently working on a solution to share a graphics card both with the host and with a virtual machine inside of it so make sure you're subscribed if you don't want to miss that one the cpus again are the xeon e5 4627 v2 which are 3.3 gigahertz 8 core 8 threaded cpus with a turbo of 4 gigahertz which means these are the fastest single threaded cpus available for this platform excluding the enthusiast chips and overclocking so without any further ado i'm go and take a backup of my trunas configuration power down the server and bring it in here so i can finally get the motherboard swapped out and i'm sure you're wondering well if the server is still running why is the motherboard already on your desk and that's a great question that's because when this motherboard decided to die the only system i had with enough pci express slots was my z390 9900k so if you think my dual xeon system is overkill yeah i'll be right back [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] so that all went exactly as planned by which i mean it took a lot longer than i expected come on you didn't really expect me to finish that in one day did you first and foremost i did have to make a couple changes to the plans along the way starting with the fact that i am not going to be virtualizing my true nas server inside of proxmox the main reason for that is i had a fair number of issues getting i o mmu set up on this board especially with the number of pci express devices that i wanted to pass through essentially i wanted true nas to have physical access to five out of the six pci express devices i installed in the server so why am i bothering to virtualize it at all secondly i wanted true nasa to have access to all 128 gigabytes of memory meaning that i would have had to fully allocate everything inside of the virtual machine leaving none left for any other vms that i wanted to run also the fact that i installed eight core eight threaded cpus meant that i was locked down to well not nearly as many threads to distribute across multiple virtual machines so running this on bare hardware seemed like the best alternative i was also not able to get the dell hba330 to play nicely inside of truenas while the controller cart is just a rebranded lsi 9308i the os would refuse to load whenever the card was installed in the system even after confirming that the hba was able to see all 24 disks and making sure it was not set up as a boot device in the system i was still not able to get the card to boot up into truenass instead i was left with the error message of root mount waiting on cam which typically means that the hba wasn't able to actually spin up the drives properly and pass them through to the os so for the time being i had to roll back to my hp h240 hba and i will definitely be swapping that out for something else here in the very near future i also ran into an issue with my son f80 cards that i have never experienced with any system i've ever worked with before and that is that when both cards were connected to the system the bios would act as if it were corrupted or out of memory now this could be that both of the sun cards were presenting themselves with boot roms to the bios so you could select them as boot devices however whenever that happened none of the tabs would show up at the top of my bios and some of the menu options below that would either be blank or a garbled and corrupted mess now this was a pretty simple fix all i had to do was tell the sun f-80s to not present their boot roms to the bios meaning that i would not be able to boot off them not that i was going to do that anyway but it was a little bit frustrating as for quite some time i couldn't select either uefi or legacy bios or even which boot device i wanted to use the bios was just unusable as far as getting everything back up and running i could have just thrown my old boot drives into the new system and it probably would have worked just fine however i wanted to do a fresh install of trunas just to make sure that no lingering issues from either my hard drive swaps or any of the hardware swaps were going to present themselves in the future like i mentioned before i started the hardware swap i took a backup of my existing trunas configuration once all the new hardware was nestled into its new home i simply reinstalled trunas and then uploaded the old configuration file a quick reboot later and all of my zfs pools file shares and accounts and permissions were all restored and back up and running so like i said this one did go pretty well according to plan even if i did have a couple unexpected wrenches thrown into the middle of it as far as hardware compatibility goes i will be following up with the dell hba330 to see if i can possibly flash the firmware over to an lsi 9300 8i that should give me a little bit better throughput and performance on my hard drive arrays even though i'm only going to be taking advantage of the six gigabit performance instead of the 12 gigabit performance that that card is technically capable of so far i'm pretty happy with the way the upgrade went and this latest round of hardware should last my truenow server for at least the next year or two or at least until the next time i get that home lab upgrade itch but that leads me perfectly to the question for the day and that is what hardware do you run in your home server and what's your next planned upgrade let me know down in the comments below on your way down there make sure to drop this video a like and subscribe to craft computing if you haven't done so already follow me on twitter craft computing to keep up with daily shenanigans like this and if you like the content you see on this channel and want to help support me in what i do consider joining the patreon or float plane links are also down in the video description thank you all so much for watching this one and as always i will see you in the next video cheers guys as i said in the intro certainly brewing company dumpster fire 2020. this is a hazy ipa clocking in at 9.3 percent boy it says hazy ipa but this is one of the clearest hazy ipas i have ever seen in my life double dry hopped hazy ipa says it right there on the pile of cardboard years ago we released a beer called dumpster fire named after a literal dumpster fire in our parking lot we thought we'd never need to brew a second version we thought wrong as 2020's metaphorical dumpster fire rages out of control we're making the best of this mess with a double dry hopped hazy ipa brimming with juicy hop flavor cheers to you 2020 don't let the door hit you on the way out i'm sorry but uh 9.3 and the tasting notes are good and riddance well played okay there's the haze now that it's kind of settled in uh it's still not completely opaque though oh that's that is really good man that's a whole new flavor experience when you don't have the hazy level of hazy we've always known that there's really good flavors in there but getting them out from the acid burn has been i think one of the biggest challenges of the hazy ipa craze uh this has the potential to be my favorite hazy yet that is seriously good it's thick bodied and hoppy yet still light and citrusy and playful and refreshing kind of all at the same time man i'm i'm calling it this is my favorite hazy ever

Channel: Craft Computing

Views: 57,497

Keywords:

Id: pDfAHW4SwzI

Length: 14min 52sec (892 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021