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Dell R720 sata SSD boot outside PERC (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by MegaTembel@alien.top to c/homelab@selfhosted.forum

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Hi guys!
I have a R720 I was going to use with proxmox partly in order to virtualize TrueNAS. For this reason I was thinking of passing the PERC raid controller through to the VM and booting proxmox from another SSD source. is there a good solution for this? if it matters I have the 16 bay front, and no disk slots on the rear. I was thinking of using a PCIE m.2 adatpter but heard that booting from those may not work if even detected.

PS. I am also running into problems with the lifecycle controller when trying to manually update firmware and bios (even if using USB flashdrive and F10) which results in me not being able to use new features of iDRAC such as HTTPS firmware mass updates.

Thanks in advance :)

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[–] SilentDecode@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (4 children)

is there a good solution for this?

Get a ODD caddy to HDD adapter, put in a proper quality SATA SSD and use the cableing of the ODD to connect it all. Install the OS and boot from it. I've been doing this to many servers over the years, also in my current R730. Works splendidly.

I was thinking of using a PCIE m.2 adatpter

The R720 and newer R730 do not support boot from NVMe. So without some Clover bootloader magic, you can't boot from this.

I am also running into problems with the lifecycle controller

You can update firmware via iDRAC itself. If you can access iDRAC with a web browser, just upload the Windows .exe file in the 'file upload' section in iDRAC.

Oh, and if your firmware of your iDRAC is still on 1.x.x.x, DO NOT UPGRADE STRAIGHT TO THE NEWEST VERSION OF 2.x.x.x. This will brick the controller. Just take your time with updates and just go slowly through every other firmware update available, until you're on the latest update. I really can't emphasize this enough.

[–] MegaTembel@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Also, should I really go through with trying to boot from outside the PERC or maybe a better solution would be to flash it to IT mode?

[–] SilentDecode@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

I completely read over the part where you mentioned 'ZFS'. Yes, IT mode flashing is better for ZFS.

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