Suggested RAID cards for FreeBSD 5-RELEASE and 6-RELEASE
Tom Daly
tom at dyndns.com
Fri Feb 3 07:53:12 PST 2006
Hi,
This seems to be an often posted topic on this list, however, its seems
everyone's milage tends to vary. My inquiry:
We are trying to validate a hardware platform for our server farms. Our
goal is to locate a server/RAID controller pair that satisfy's the
following requirements:
Provides RAID levels 0, 1, and 10.
Provides for management via BIOS over Serial Console Redirect
Provides for management via OS CLI or GUI (but no X-Windows, should be
able to run through a standard shell)
Provides logging ability for events to syslog, e-mail, or logfile
Our last successful deployment was using the Intel SE7501WV2 Motherboard,
with the Intel SRCZCR RAID controller. However, Intel has discontinued
both of these projects.
In our testing, we've tried the following, and come up with these results:
Dell PowerEdge 2850 with Dell PERC4e/Di:
Provides required RAID levels
Management via BIOS over serial mostly works
Management via OS (MegaRC) seems broken
Logging (MegaMon) works
Both of the programs MegaRC and MegaMon
http://people.freebsd.org/~emoore/MegaRAID_SCSI/
Dell PowerEdge 2850 with Adaptec 2130SLP
Provides required RAID levels
Management via BIOS over serial works
Management via aaccli works
Logging could be accomplished with aaccli and script files, but I
see nothing to directly accomplish this.
Intel SR7520JR2 with Intel SRCS16 (SATA)
Provides required RAID levels
Management via BIOS over serial is not possible
No OS Tools found for logging or management
Any of the Intel software stack 2 cards would appear to have this
problem.
We're considering a trial of the 3ware cards. Thier software support
appears to be pretty good, however, I'm concerned about this recent post
to this list:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-scsi/2006-January/002203.html
The Dell 2850 seems to have a slew of other problems, namely with memory
and such, but it still seems like a viable candidate. Does anyone have any
stellar FreeBSD + Hardware RAID success stories, somewhat akin to my Intel
WV2 + SRCZCR experience?
In the Fourth Quarter 2005 FreeBSD Status Report, a section titled "LSI
MegaRAID improvements" was included. Does anyone know if this includes the
rebranded OEM/Dell controllers? Furthermore, has anyone gotten the
LSI-provided management apps to run, as stated in the article? Are they
native apps, or must they be run under linux compat mode?
Thanks for your input,
Tom Daly
--
Thomas J. Daly
tom at dyndns.com
Dynamic Network Services, Inc.
http://www.dyndns.com/
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