How to safely upgrade motherboard/CPU?


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Like the title says, I'm about to swap out my existing AMD board and CPU with a faster Intel setup.  In addition to unraid, I have a couple of dockers and a couple of windows 10 VMs running right now.  Do I simply back up my flash, take note of the drive assignments, power down, swap, and power back up?  Will the array come back up with the proper drive assignments even though they will be connected to a completely different set of SATA ports on a new motherboard?

 

The CPU I'm putting in is an Intel i7-6800k which will show 12 cores in unraid (6 cores hyperthreaded).  My old Phenom II 1055T has 6 cores non-threaded so what will happen to the core assignments for my VMs given the mismatch?  Should I set my VMs to not auto-start prior to the upgrade and check the core assignments when I boot up on the new CPU before I re-launch the VMs?  Also will the Windows 10 VMs just detect a CPU change and continue to function as normal?

 

Sorry, lots of questions but I just want to make sure there are no gotchas I should be aware of before I make the swap.

 

Thanks!

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Like the title says, I'm about to swap out my existing AMD board and CPU with a faster Intel setup.  In addition to unraid, I have a couple of dockers and a couple of windows 10 VMs running right now.  Do I simply back up my flash, take note of the drive assignments, power down, swap, and power back up? 

Yes, backup your flash drive and take note of each of the drive assignments.

Will the array come back up with the proper drive assignments even though they will be connected to a completely different set of SATA ports on a new motherboard?

I have never done this so I could be wrong but my guess would be that you are going to have to reassign each drive once you connect them to the new motherboard. If that does happen I would only assign the data drives first without parity and start the array. Then double check to make sure all your data is there and you didn't accidentally assign the parity drive as a data drive. Assuming all looks good then stop the array and assign parity and then do the parity checks.

The CPU I'm putting in is an Intel i7-6800k which will show 12 cores in unraid (6 cores hyperthreaded).  My old Phenom II 1055T has 6 cores non-threaded so what will happen to the core assignments for my VMs given the mismatch?  Should I set my VMs to not auto-start prior to the upgrade and check the core assignments when I boot up on the new CPU before I re-launch the VMs? 

I would set all VM's to not auto-start. Then once you get all the discs a figured out above, I would use the unRAID editor and re-assign the correct cores to each VM. This will make sure you have the correct cores selected.

Also will the Windows 10 VMs just detect a CPU change and continue to function as normal?

Windows 10 may detect a hardware change and ask you to activate windows again. I know for sure if you use Microsoft Office 2010 it will ask you to reactive office if it detects the CPU has changed.

 

 

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The disks will all come back in the same order as they were before.  All your docker containers will run as if nothing ever changed.  But it never hurts to make a note or print a screenshot.  VMs  I can't comment on

 

Sent from my SM-T560NU using Tapatalk

 

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The CPU I'm putting in is an Intel i7-6800k which will show 12 cores in unraid (6 cores hyperthreaded).  My old Phenom II 1055T has 6 cores non-threaded so what will happen to the core assignments for my VMs given the mismatch?  Should I set my VMs to not auto-start prior to the upgrade and check the core assignments when I boot up on the new CPU before I re-launch the VMs?  Also will the Windows 10 VMs just detect a CPU change and continue to function as normal?

Definitely stop VM autorun and double check core assignments.

In terms of Windows, it should be automatic but you might be asked to reactivate.

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Have done this very thing myself about a month ago I can tell you it was a very pain free experience.

 

The most important thing I can say is check and triple check your bios settings before you first boot to unraid as this can save you many hours of trying to work out why its not right.

 

My VM didnt mind the transfer to a new mobo and cpu but yes disable auto start just to make sure your network settings and core assignments are correct.

 

And dont worry about having to re-register your VM O/S as you will not need to.

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7 minutes ago, Fiservedpi said:

Doing this next week just to confirm make sure the drivers are in the same sata ports on the new mobo? Like SDB, SDC, SDD ETC..? AND make sure parity which is SDE goes on SDE again?

Drive labels don't matter, and even if you don't switch hardware, they aren't guaranteed to stay the same from one boot to another.  IE: unRaid doesn't care

 

Same thing with the ports.

 

unRaid only cares if you switch from a controller to an actual RAID controller (ie: IR mode) as the drive serial numbers will change at that point.  

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1 hour ago, Fiservedpi said:

Thanks @Squid so pretty much just move the discs over and Unraid will Handel it, what about cahè Unraid Will Handel that too?

Yes - in principle it will all ‘just work’.    The one exception is when you are running VMs with hardware pass-through as in such a case the hardware id’s of the passed through hardware will probably change and need adjusting.

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 4/16/2020 at 8:58 AM, Fiservedpi said:

My goodness that was painless, literally 5 min once new hardware was ready

This thread was exactly what I needed. 

I built my unRaid box on a Z87 Mobo with an i3 CPU and it seems to be maxing out the CPU more and more often lately.  So, I can just throw an i7 (the older ones for my mobo are fairly cheap now and that should be more than enough processing power) in there and there's not much of anything that I should have to do with unRaid, right?  I'll screenshot my "main" screen with all the drive assignments just in case.  Anything else I should do before I swap out the CPU?

I haven't done anything to set up any VMs.  I just use dockers (Plex and Zoneminder NVR) and an older Phaze plugin for Transmission (I tried switching to Docker, but couldn't get it to work).  None of those things should care about the CPU changing?

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On 4/11/2020 at 10:28 AM, Squid said:

unRaid only cares if you switch from a controller to an actual RAID controller (ie: IR mode) as the drive serial numbers will change at that point.  

 

Sorry for necro, but this seems like the right place to ask...

 

I'm swapping out motherboards and the new board has 2 mini-sas ports that some of my drives will be connecting through.  In addition to bringing over all of the old drives, I will be adding a couple of larger drives, one of which will be the new parity drive.  All drives are sata, except there might be 1 new sas drive, as well.  

 

Current plan is to replace the parity drive and let it build out.  (After preclearing, obviously) Take picture of drive assignments in GUI.  Assuming that goes well, then swap out boards, but connecting the array drives is where I'm concerned.  The board has 4 sata ports and an integrated LSI 2308 with 2 mini-sas connectors.  There's 6 total sata drives (including parity) and 1 sas drive.  I was planning on using a mini-sas to sata breakout cable for 2 sata drives, and a mini-sas to sas to the single sas drive.  

 

Not sure what problems I'll run into with assigning drives in the array. 

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44 minutes ago, pendo said:

assigning drives in the array

Ideally, controllers will pass the drive serial number to Unraid, and Unraid will use that serial number to identify disks. In that case, Unraid will recognize the drives and assign them as before.

 

RAID controllers are NOT recommended for many reasons, one of which is they might not pass the drive serial number, but instead create a different identifier for a disk.

 

As long as no RAID controllers are involved before or after the hardware changes, Unraid should already know how disks are assigned, assuming you keep your configuration, which is in the config folder on the flash drive.

 

The most important thing is to not assign any data disk to any parity slot or it will be overwritten by parity.

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2 hours ago, pendo said:

the new board has 2 mini-sas ports

Depending on the board it may well be shipped in RAID (IR) mode, but many can be flashed to IT mode so it will work without issues.

 

Google flash lsi 2308 it mode

with your specific board and see if you can find instructions similar to this https://blog.widodh.nl/2014/10/flash-lsi-2308-to-it-mode-on-a-supermicro-x10sl7-f-mainboard/

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21 hours ago, trurl said:

Ideally, controllers will pass the drive serial number to Unraid, and Unraid will use that serial number to identify disks. In that case, Unraid will recognize the drives and assign them as before.

 

RAID controllers are NOT recommended for many reasons, one of which is they might not pass the drive serial number, but instead create a different identifier for a disk.

 

As long as no RAID controllers are involved before or after the hardware changes, Unraid should already know how disks are assigned, assuming you keep your configuration, which is in the config folder on the flash drive.

 

The most important thing is to not assign any data disk to any parity slot or it will be overwritten by parity.

Thank you.  I'm hoping it will be fairly simple. I'm most concerned about the long parity rebuild, but a recent health check shows all drive are in good shape, albeit *very* full.  One 4TB drive is showing only a little over 2GB free 😖

 

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19 hours ago, JonathanM said:

Depending on the board it may well be shipped in RAID (IR) mode, but many can be flashed to IT mode so it will work without issues.

 

Google flash lsi 2308 it mode

with your specific board and see if you can find instructions similar to this https://blog.widodh.nl/2014/10/flash-lsi-2308-to-it-mode-on-a-supermicro-x10sl7-f-mainboard/

Yes, this is what I thought I was going to need to do, but while struggling to find the LSI firmware for the ASRock board, I found nother post saying that they didn't have to do that with this board.  It's an old ASRock extended mini-itx lga 1150 board.  I am going to need to modify the drive cage in my case a tad, I think (move it to the other side) base on another post I read.  

 

I did find a link to the ASRock LSI firmware on a freenas forum, but the link was bad.  So far, I haven't gotten a reply from ASRock support.  So, at this point, I'm kinda just hoping it will work, as it did for the other unraider.  

 

Four of my drives will be connected to the same type of sata controller as before.  But two will need to go on one of the mini-sas ports. What if I boot up the "new" machine with just a single array drive on the mini-sas to see if unRAID recognizes the serial number? If it does, all good?  I still feel like it would be best to get it to IT mode, though...

 

 

This little server is gettting on in age, now, at just over 7.5 years old.  But, it has been working wonderfully for me, and don't really feel the need to upgrade, other than I just need more room.  Moving to this board provides a very economical way to do just that.  After all said and done, total array storage is moving from 16TB to 40TB (1TB single cache).  

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