I am building a filer based on OpenIndiana/ZFS using the SuperMicro 6036ST-6LR super server because I need High Availability (HA). To use ZFS efficiently I want to use the SAS controllers as I/T HBA’s.

1 The Problem

I flashed the controllers using PH11 from ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/driver/SAS/…8/IT/Firmware/ and everything seemed to work fine. The flash completed successfully but I could not see the SAS expander and the 8 SAS drives in the SAS BIOS topology list when I rebooted. I also expected to see them on the Boot page of the MB BIOS as well. The MB BIOS did show the SAS controller (but no drives).

Note that I also did not see the drives with the original version of the firmware.

1.1 Screen Shot – LSI SAS 2008 Controller Config Utility

During the boot process I type Ctrl-C and the controller was recognized.

1.2 Screen Shot – LSI SAS 2008 Controller Topology

I then navigated to the topology screen and saw this. As you can see, there are no devices and no SAS expander. Yesterday, following the same procedure, I saw the SAS controller in the boot menu (but with no devices). I have no idea why it didn’t show up this time.

1.3 Screen Short – BIOS Boot Menu

I then looked at the BIOS boot menu and the only recognized device was the USB I had plugged in.

1.4 It should work

This setup should work.

There are vendors out there like Nexenta and VA technologies that run ZFS on these chassis’s. I am sure they are not using RAID because ZFS runs better without it.

2 Where am I looking for help

This is a brief summary things I tried after reading all of the technical documentation that I could find, reseated the boards, checked the components, talked to friends, tried booting different OS’s and everything else that I could think of.

2.1 SuperMicro

This is the obvious first place. I spoke to a customer service person and sent them email on Friday. They were very helpful but they only offer service on weekdays (even though the SuperServer hot-line says 24 hours which I thought meant 24/7 not 24/5).

2.2 ServeTheHome

Here is another link to where I am trying to get help: http://forums.servethehome.com/showthread.php?505-Supermicro-6036ST-6LR-SAS-2008-controller-IT-mode&p=3598#post3598.

They were very helpful. Their feedback helped confirm that I am not losing my mind.

2.3 Google/Bing

Searching did not really help with this problem much but it did eventually point me to ServeTheHome.

3 Parts List

Here is my parts list:

Part	Qty	Description
SuperMicro 6036ST-6LR	1	High end storage bridge bay (SBB) comprised of the SC937 chassis and two X*DTS-F dual processor serverboards. It also has a SAS mid-plane (BPN-SAS-937-O-P) and sixteen HDD carriers. Two SAS controller mezanine cards (AOM-SAS2-L8).
HDD	8	Seagate Constellation ST1000NM0001 ES SAS 6GB/s 1TB
CPU	2	Intel Xeon E5645
RAM	6	Kingston KST KVR1333D3/2GR R 2GB
Ethernet Card	1	SuperMicro AOC-SG-I2 2 port Gbps ethernet LAN card

4 Firmware Download

Here is the script I used to download the firmware flash files:

5 USB Flash Update

I then mounted by USB drive and copied the files over.

6 Flashed the Controller Firmware

After updating the USB drive, I inserted into the server board KVM port using an adapter and rebooted. I then executed the following DOS commands:

It took about 5 minutes to successfully flash the firmware.

7 Eratta

This is a collection of random thoughts that will be used later.

The power consumption of this setup was pretty good. I was measuring about 360W with everything turned on but with no activity.