# FreeBSD & HPE Proliant DL160 Gen10



## benoitc (Apr 18, 2021)

Is FreeBSD supporting well HPE Proliant servers ? I have an HPE Proliant DL160 Gen10 and I am wondering how FreeBSD supports such hardware.  Can sanyone share its experience whith the HP hardware? What did I miss vs using a debian or ubuntu which are supported on it?


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## VladiBG (Apr 18, 2021)

HPE doesn't provide support for FreeBSD.

Currently there's only small team in HPE which test ProLiant servers on *NIX in Japan but no official software based support for RAID, Network or ILO configuration. So all configuration must be done via ILO or RBSU.

Here is the web page with the in house tests of HPE for *BSD


			https://www.hpe.com/jp/ja/servers/bsd.html


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## benoitc (Apr 18, 2021)

VladiBG said:


> HPE doesn't provide support for FreeBSD.


Are they still supporting the hardware (next-day service) if we are using a BSD though? I think I can live with offline upgrade of the  firmwares.. But if it breaks the support of the hardware that become an issue


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## Denis Shaposhnikov (Apr 18, 2021)

I have DL20 Gen10 server. It has installed 12.2 and works fine except one thing, very noisy fans. That was the reason why I installed this server in garage instead of home.


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## benoitc (Apr 18, 2021)

Denis Shaposhnikov said:


> I have DL20 Gen10 server. It has installed 12.2 and works fine except one thing, very noisy fans. That was the reason why I installed this server in garage instead of home.


is this brcause of the drivers or it was doing the same under a supported OS?


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## VladiBG (Apr 18, 2021)

benoitc said:


> Are they still supporting the hardware (next-day service) if we are using a BSD though?


Yes hardware support is not related to the OS in any way.


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## Denis Shaposhnikov (Apr 18, 2021)

benoitc said:


> is this brcause of the drivers or it was doing the same under a supported OS?


I can't tell for sure, but I read on their forum, that it's because absence of a freebsd agent. For any fan complaints they are suggesting to install some kind of agent, which exists for linux only.


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## VladiBG (Apr 18, 2021)

If you are using dynamic smart array raid then the temp of the disk are reported correctly and the fan speed should be low. If you are using AHCI the disk temperatures are reported via Agentless management service for ILO 5 which software is not available for FreeBSD and Fan is running on high speed. There's similar issue when you are using non complain NMVE drive with missing temperature reporting.






						Document Display | HPE Support Center
					






					support.hpe.com
				









						Document Display | HPE Support Center
					






					support.hpe.com


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## Denis Shaposhnikov (Apr 18, 2021)

Just for imagination. Right now iLO on my server shows fan speed 34% and this is very loud.


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## VladiBG (Apr 18, 2021)

> The fan speed remains between 6% and 8% for all three fans from the concern of high fan speed (above 30%) once Agentless Management Service is installed


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## benoitc (Apr 18, 2021)

VladiBG said:


> If you are using dynamic smart array raid then the temp of the disk are reported correctly and the fan speed should be low. If you are using AHCI the disk temperatures are reported via Agentless management service for ILO 5 which software is not available for FreeBSD and Fan is running on high speed. There's similar issue when you are using non complain NMVE drive with missing temperature reporting.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


thanks for the link. I'm not sure then if i will use freebsd then on this machine  One of the main reason I wanted to do it was ZFS.
I thought that the  HPE Smart Array E208i-p SR Gen10 will let freebsd correctly report the temperature even in HBA.


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## VladiBG (Apr 18, 2021)

If you haven't already bought this one i would recommend to select a server with redundant power supply with hardware raid controller like P400 series and use SAS drives.


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## benoitc (Apr 18, 2021)

VladiBG said:


> If you haven't already bought this one i would recommend to select a server with redundant power supply with hardware raid controller like P400 series and use SAS drives.


hrm I have already one machine (redundant supply) and SAS drives but with this controller; I will look at changong it for the second one . So you mean using hardware raid with freebsd instead of using ZFS?


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## Denis Shaposhnikov (Apr 18, 2021)

benoitc said:


> I thought that the HPE Smart Array E208i-p SR Gen10 will let freebsd correctly report the temperature even in HBA.


I thought the same and bought this controller. And yes, it reports the temperature. At least I see it through iLO. Without Smart Array fan speed was 70%, now it's just 30%.


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## VladiBG (Apr 19, 2021)

benoitc said:


> So you mean using hardware raid with freebsd instead of using ZFS?


Yes, instead of ZFS use UFS. Note that for RAID 5 you need flash-backed write cache (FBWC) it's actually 72-bit DDR3 memory for r/w cache. You still have UFS snapshots and live system remote backups using dump no journal (ufs, local, soft-updates)

Here is one of my servers (DL 380 G9)
HPE Smart Array P440 Controller is a low-profile, PCIe3 x8, 12 Gb/s SAS RAID



> ciss0: <HP Smart Array P440> port 0x3000-0x30ff mem 0x92e00000-0x92efffff,0x92f00000-0x92f003ff at device 0.0 numa-domain 0 on pci2
> ciss0: PERFORMANT Transport
> 
> camcontrol devli
> ...


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## benoitc (Apr 20, 2021)

also for the record in lba mode when the controller allows hybrid mode, fans stay happily at 11%. on gen10 temperature is fetched by ilo 5 without the need of the agent according the spec (screenshot attached) .


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