Flashing H310/H710 RAID Controllers to LSI IT Mode

#RAID #ITMode #Linux

Full steps can be found at https://i12bretro.github.io/tutorials/0837.html

Background I recently purchased a Dell Poweredge server with a H310 RAID controller. One of the purposes of the new server is to run TrueNAS Scale as a VM inside Proxmox. To get the best performance out of TrueNAS and ZFS, the H310 needs to be flashed to LSI IT mode so ZFS can have direct access to the drives. IT mode also improves the disk drive IOPS (Input/output operations per second) performance.   What is LSI IT Mode? IT (Initiator Target) mode essentially disables the hardware RAID capabilities of the controller, allowing the operating system to see and interact with each disk drive directly.   Disclaimer This process will overwrite the firmware on the RAID controller. If not done correctly, the process can damage and brick the RAID controller.   Things You Will Need    - A USB flash drive, at least 4 GB  https://amzn.to/3wkR5ju |  https://amzn.to/3qkrJ1p |  https://amzn.to/3Nhu9b9    - One of the following hardware RAID controllers H310 Mini Mono (⇦ used in this tutorial) H310 Full Size H710 Mini Mono H710P Mini Mono H710 Full Size H710P Full Size H810 Full Size   Before You Begin    01. Remove the battery from the RAID controller    02. Disable the following technologies in the BIOS       - Virtualization       - SR-IOV       - IOMMU    06. Set the Boot Mode to BIOS/Legacy (not UEFI)   Preparing the Flash Utilities Huge thanks to  http://fohdeesha.com for compiling the software and steps to complete the flashing process into an easy to follow procedure.      01. Download the PERC flashing utilities  https://fohdeesha.com/docs/store/perc/perc-crossflash-v2.2.zip    02. Download the Ventoy installer  https://www.ventoy.net/en/download.html    03. Extract the downloaded perc-crossflash .zip file    04. Extract the downloaded Ventoy .zip file    05. Run Ventoy2Disk.exe    06. Plug in a USB flash drive at least 4 GB in size    07. Click the refresh icon    08. Select the flash drive from the device dropdown    09. Click the Install button    10. After the installation completes, copy the Linux and FreeDOS .iso files from the extracted perc-crossflash folder to the Ventoy partition    11. Safely remove the USB flash drive    12. Plug the flash drive into the target server   Collecting RAID Controller Information    01. Power on the server hardware ≫ Boot to the flash drive    02. Select the FreeDOS .iso from the Ventoy menu    03. Once FreeDOS has booted, run the following command          info    04. Take a photo of and/or carefully write down the SAS address from the output    05. Compare the output Product Name and ChipRevision (H310 Mini in this example) to the listing on https://fohdeesha.com/docs/perc.html#finding-your-card-revision; If there isn't an EXACT MATCH stop    06. Shutdown or reboot the server   Flashing to IT Mode The steps below are specific to the H310 Mini RAID controller in my device (https://fohdeesha.com/docs/H310.html). Make sure to follow the steps for your target RAID controller model.      01. Power on the server hardware ≫ Boot to the flash drive    02. Select the Linux .iso from the Ventoy menu    03. Log into Linux using the username user and password live    04. If you plan to SSH into the device, run the following command to output the IP address and connect via SSH          ipinfo    05. Continue with the following commands in Linux on the target server device          # elevate to root shell          sudo su -          # output the SAS address          # take a photo of and/or carefully write down the SAS address from the output          # it will be required after the flashing process          sas-mega          # flash the raid controller firmware          H310-Mini          # once the flash completes without errors, reboot the server          reboot now    06. Boot to the flash drive    07. Select the Linux .iso from the Ventoy menu          NOTE: If you see kernel panic errors during startup, shutdown the server hardware and power it back on and boot back into Linux from Ventoy    08. Log back into Linux using the username user and password live    09. Continue with the following commands          # elevate to root shell          sudo su -          # set the sas address          setsas ≪%sas address from output earlier%≫          # output info about the new state of the controller          info    10. If you'll be booting from drives attached to the RAID controller, continue with the following steps to flash the boot ROM images          # flash bios/legacy boot rom          flashboot /root/Bootloaders/mptsas2.rom          # flash uefi boot rom          flashboot /root/Bootloaders/x64sas2.rom          # shutdown the system

....Full steps can be found on GitHub [link at the top]

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