FreeNAS system troubleshooting

[IvIercTTV]

Ok, so a company I am working for decided to upgrade a server of theirs, and now they are having some issues getting things to work together.

 

System specs are

 

 

Ryzen 9 3950x

64gb 3000mhz ram

Asus prime X570-p 

5x 4tb wd red has drives

1x sad for FreeNAS

4x 2tb nvme drives on an expansion card

 

Issue one...

 

They had a 3200g in the system before, and the new cpu doesnt have integrated graphics.

 

So we are trying to run headless...however everything I have tried, the system still hangs on VGA check on the Q-led display

 

 

Issue 2

 

ASUS Hyper m.2 card is only detecting 1 drive in pcie x16 slot 2, and detecting NO drives while in pcie x16 slot 1.

 

However all 4 led lights are green on the back of the card.

 

Not sure if I need to set It to raid mode without actually setting raids as i want FreeNAS to handle it..

 

Any help would be appreciated as I'm currently banging my head against my keyboard while I'm trying to do this remotely...

[Spdrcrv6tt]

So do you have a discreet gpu installed? With no iGPU there will be no video. I can only think of maybe the bios isn't set right for the pcie issue, I'm not sure.

[Electronics Wizardy]

29 minutes ago, IvIercTTV said:

ASUS Hyper m.2 card is only detecting 1 drive in pcie x16 slot 2, and detecting NO drives while in pcie x16 slot 1.

Does it support pcie bifurcation? You need pcie bifurcation for those cards to work.

 

30 minutes ago, IvIercTTV said:

So we are trying to run headless...however everything I have tried, the system still hangs on VGA check on the Q-led display

Some boards like yours just won't support it. Id get a board with a igpu like the asrock rack ones, or get a cheap gpu for the system like a gt 710.

 

 

[Windows7ge]

Some boards won't boot without a GPU of some sort installed. At current I don't know of any dummy-plug way around it.

 

If this is a server being used in a server application why has server hardware not been used?

[IvIercTTV]

5 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Does it support pcie bifurcation? You need pcie bifurcation for those cards to work.

 

Yes, according to ASUS it does, seems after some digging however it only supports a total of 2 NVME Drives via the card tho....

in theory could i get another expansion card and use PCIE_1 and 2 to get 3 NVME drives and then use the on board NVME slot to make it to 4 or is that not how that would work?
 

[Electronics Wizardy]

22 minutes ago, IvIercTTV said:

Yes, according to ASUS it does, seems after some digging however it only supports a total of 2 NVME Drives via the card tho....

in theory could i get another expansion card and use PCIE_1 and 2 to get 3 NVME drives and then use the on board NVME slot to make it to 4 or is that not how that would work?

you may need to enable it in the bios, check with the board manual.

 

Yea, you should be able to do this, but id probably just get a single faster ssd if it was me.

 

Also how are you using the cache drive in freenas? IM guessing it won't help that much, slog is only used for sync writes and l2arc probably won't help here. 

[IvIercTTV]

actually the 5 satas are their own thing, the ssd is for the OS and the nvme's will be for something completely different still.

customer wants to retire their old webserver and put it on this....so it will be running several different things....

also im just the hardware guy XD

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

On 6/8/2020 at 10:04 PM, IvIercTTV said:

actually the 5 satas are their own thing, the ssd is for the OS and the nvme's will be for something completely different still.

customer wants to retire their old webserver and put it on this....so it will be running several different things....

also im just the hardware guy XD

 

Id stay away from freens then, and get. os tht much better t running vms, like proxmox on the hardware then.

 

Also if you can return it, id really try to get some real server parts like the asrock server board or a refurb dual xeon system.