Re: HP ProLiant server running NetBSD 9 setup suggestions?

[Andreas Gustafsson <gson%gson.org@localhost>]

Chris Hanson wrote:
> I just got an HP ProLiant DL360p Gen8 on which I plan to run NetBSD,
> primarily to serve files and do some light emulation. (Things like
> VAX on SIMH, not arcade games on MAME.) Unfortunately I don’t have
> disks for it yet so I can’t set things up, but I realized that gave
> me the opportunity to ask for advice.
> 
> So, with that in mind: Is there anything I should plan for in
> setting up NetBSD on this system? Which filesystem should I use?
> Should I set up LVM or RAID? Does NetBSD support the HP Smart Array
> P420i RAID controller? (I think it’s the sort of thing for which the
> supported Windows/Linux/ESXi versions need a driver.)

My experience is with the DL360 Gen7 and the P410i, but I expect yours
will be pretty similar.  NetBSD runs well on the Gen7 and supports the
P410i.  The RAID functionality in the P410i can't be bypassed, so the
closest thing to a JBOD you can have is a set of RAID0 volumes of one
drive each. This requires formatting the drives with the controller's
RAID metadata so you can't just plug in a drive formatted on another
system (though the opposite works).  The P420 may be different in this
regard.

Installing a BBWC/FBWC module and battery/supercapacitor was necessary
to get reasonable disk performance or even to support more than one
RAID0 volume.  For things that need to be fast, I use an NVMe SSD in a
PCIe slot (but you can't boot from that).

Make sure not to expose the iLO management interface to the Internet
as many versions of it have catastrophic security issues.

> And, perhaps most importantly, is there anything I should install,
> configure, or tune to keep the fans nice and quiet? Booting the
> NetBSD 9.0 installer from a USB key, the system was plenty quiet,
> but I know those fans can move a lot of air if they have to.

Beware that installing an unsupported disk will make the fans run at
full blast.  The list at this URL is useful for selecting drives that
don't have this problem:

  http://dascomputerconsultants.com/HPCompaqServerDrives.htm

-- 
Andreas Gustafsson, gson%gson.org@localhost