Suggested RAID cards for FreeBSD 5-RELEASE and 6-RELEASE

[Doug Ambrisko]

Tom Daly writes:
| 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
		MegaRC from LSI for FreeBSD seems to work okay.
|  	Logging (MegaMon) works
		I doubt this if it comes from emoore's stuff.
		It will blow up other programs on the system.
| 
|  	Both of the programs MegaRC and MegaMon 
| http://people.freebsd.org/~emoore/MegaRAID_SCSI/
		I'd be carefull since they are really old and have
		some bugs in them.
 
| 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.
		Logging mostly happens via the driver direct and doesn't
		require an app. like LSI.  You might have to start using
		the Linux version to get updates.
 
| 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?

There are BIOS/RAID firmware issues with systems >4G.  The latest
stuff helps.  I'd stay away from MegaMon under FreeBSD.  The Linux
version was slightly better.
 
| 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?

The Linux IOCTL emulation requires Linux app's to be run in Linux compat
mode.  It was infact developed and tested on Dell PE2850s so yes I have
got it to run on it since I did the initial work!

To make the Linux versus of MegaMon reliable I had to hack FreeBSD's
shared memory to re-use the same memory for Linux app's.  Otherwise
it quickly leaked and ran out of memory.  It leaks on Linux but takes
longer to run out of memory.  Hopefully LSI releases a fixed version if
they haven't already.

Doug A.