PERC 5/E SAS RAID in Dell PowerEdge 1950/2950

[Brian A. Seklecki]

repost from freebsd-questions@ (no help there)

~BAS

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All:

Does anyone have details about the new PERC 5/E SAS RAID controller Dell
is (or will soon be) shipping in the 1950/2950?

This replaces the long standing PERC4 (which was an OEM LSI / AMI
MegaRAID U320) in the [1,2]850 series.

Obviously this is an OEM chipset as well.  I see it listed in mfi(4).
It appears to be backported into RELENG_6.

It appears to be an OEM of the HBA ASIC on the LSI Logic products:

-MegaRAID SAS 8408E
-MegaRAID SAS 8308ELP
-MegaRAID SAS 8344ELP
-MegaRAID SAS 8408E
-MegaRAID SAS 8480E

Do we know if ports/sysutils/megarc supports /dev/fmi?  The Linux
drivers for SUSE/RHEL seems to suggest that the new driver is simply an
extension to the existing one, so it seems likely the management
interface is the same.

I see LSI lists a separate CLI:
http://lsi.com/files/support/rsa/MR_SAS_1.0_1.00.07-Linux-MegaCLI.txt
http://lsi.com/files/support/rsa/MR_SAS_1.0_1.00.07-Linux-MegaCLI.zip

Which is different from where we get the MegaRC "Beta":
http://www.lsilogic.com/files/support/rsa/beta/drivers/ (no directory
listing support)

There were some posts in April that suggested Linux Binary emulation and
linux compat "sysfs" or "linprocfs" would be needed instead of a native
source code port.  I think it's safe to say most people will be
disinclined to enable Linux binary emulation on production servers.  The
controller is pretty much useless without a management CLI.  Plus, the
last I heard from Dell, there was no chance of integrating RAID
management with any out-of-band management API (IPMI,BMC, SNMP, etc.)

Also, anyone who may have worked with an 1950/2950 demo unit or non-OEM
LSILogic card: has the BIOS menu usability and/or general intelligence
of the card has improved?

For example, with the PERC 4/e you could pull a component out of a
RAID1, power on the system, and the RAID controller would scan the SCSI
bus and report all volumes a healthy.

TIA,
~BAS